


Not the Kid

by Cakepopple



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Gen, IronDad and SpiderSon, Irondad, spiderson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-28
Updated: 2020-03-16
Packaged: 2020-10-30 02:08:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 29,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20806766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cakepopple/pseuds/Cakepopple
Summary: What if Peter hadn't been snapped away, but May had been?What would Tony do?Everything he could.





	1. The Fear of Falling Apart

**Author's Note:**

> should I be updating my other fic??? yes. am I still writing for it?? absolutely!! the chapter is like halfway done, I was just struck with the idea for this fic and it wouldn't leave me alone so here we are!! 
> 
> it's kinda angsty, but anyone who follows me knows that everything I write ends happily :)

A lump wells thick and heavy in Tony’s throat as he watches everyone on Titan with him disappear. One by one, falling to pieces like they’re glass shattering. There’s an ache in his chest, as though something inside himself has crumbled the same way, is crumbling more with each ally that falls away. Every fading face is a pebble on a windshield, sending cracks spindling to new places, closer and closer to where he most fears they’ll hit—

“Mr. Stark?” Not the kid.  _ Not the kid, _ he pleads, turning to where he’d heard Peter call out to him. His lungs feel tight, paper bags crumpled in on themselves, as he clenches his muscles to keep from begging aloud. His molars throb from how harshly he grinds his teeth. His brows furrow deeply, until his forehead burns. His hands twitch, tense and nervous, by his sides. “Mr. Stark, I don’t…”

Something vile climbs out from Tony’s gut, dragging nails up his spine and tugging his attention to land, unwavering, on Peter. On the way he’s staggering forward, hand over his lips, tears in his eyes. His other hand drifts to his stomach and he lurches forward, heaving into the palm still over his mouth. He sags as his knees give out; Tony catches him by his shoulder, expecting Peter’s suit and arm to crinkle and flake apart at his touch. There is no number Tony can put to the amount of relief he feels when no such thing happens. “You’re alright, kid,” he breathes, as Peter is wracked with another need to empty his stomach. 

Peter falls lax against him, chin over his shoulder and nose in the side of his neck, and Tony says nothing of invading personal space this time. He winds his arms around the kid’s back and they share some semblance of understanding when Peter starts to cry. “I don’t feel right. This feels wrong, like something’s—like it’s wrong.” While he can’t say he completely relates to what Peter senses, Tony can understand the sound of loss in his voice; the same sound had been in his ragged breathing when he’d turned to Peter, expecting to lose him like everyone else on Titan. It’s still sizzling under his skin. The fear of Peter disappearing is hot against his nerves as he keeps them both upright. His life has been cruel and he half expects Peter’s belated disappearance to be one final mockery, one final jab. “Something is missing,” Peter murmurs, under his breath, and Tony nods solemnly because he sees the evidence of that fact in the dust on the ground around him. “We lost.”

“I know, but we’re gonna be okay.” Peter shakes his head at that, pulling away to look Tony straight in the soul. Fiery disagreement pools in his eyes, but it’s soggy and weak. A charred lump of wood bobbing at the surface of a mournful lake, and Peter’s clinging to the driftwood to keep from sinking down into the mourning, the mourning for what’s happened on Earth, though he can’t see the grief from Titan. He stares at Tony, lips trembling, like he longs to agree with being okay, but like something smolders in his stomach, telling him agreement just isn’t an option. Because it’s not okay. Something is  _ very _ wrong; that’s what’s written in the sour curl of his lips and the wrinkles along the bridge of his nose. 

The way Peter looks at him, weak and scared, makes him seem like more of a child than usual. He doesn’t have the will or strength of the Avenger Tony made him on the way here; he has the wide, watery eyes of a child, terrified in the face of danger. Danger he feels is his fault. 

Barely, Peter manages, “I wanna see Aunt May, Mr. Stark. I wanna go home. She doesn’t know I’m up here, she doesn’t know I made it. What if she thinks I—that I also—” Something painful cracks against the back of Tony’s skull, telling him the odds aren’t favorable. There’s only a fifty percent chance May is even alive. Fifty percent, if Thanos had done what he’d set out to do. 

Tony thinks he’s lucky Peter is in the favorable fifty, but fears the kid’s aunt is not as lucky. The idea of May being the  _ other _ half, the half that’s just  _ gone,  _ is toxic in his lungs. 

He doesn’t want to think about it, wants even less to bring it up to the kid. That’s not what he needs to hear after seeing a whole team of people vanish. Peter doesn’t need to be reminded that he could go home and find no one there for him. 

More tears are slobbering down his cheeks; Tony slips an arm around his trembling shoulders and pulls him closer. Peter’s suit snags on the untidily closed wound in Tony’s stomach, and it hurts, but not as much as the sound of Peter’s sobbing. “I’ll get you home, kid.” 

He doesn’t know what home will be like, doesn’t know who will be left of Peter’s home. But if nothing else, home will have Tony. Peter’s his kid up here, in space, and it’s his job to keep him safe until he’s passed off to May again.  _ If _ he’s passed off to May again. If she’s not there, he’s Tony’s kid indefinitely. Even if Tony has to build him a new home, with Pepper and Rhodey and Happy, he  _ will _ get his kid home. He swallows around a sinking, bowling ball size void in his stomach, telling him there’s a fifty percent chance that’ll be what has to happen. 

“I promise, I’ll get you home.” 

But his voice is a tremor.


	2. You Deserved Better From Me Than One Suit and a World of Troubles

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> kudos to anyone who gets the chapter title :')

A triangle of paper hits him to one side of his nose, catching in his mouth on its way down. Tony buzzes his lips as he spits it out, then lets his tongue unfold over his exaggerated scowl. Quietly, he laughs. “Ow. You didn’t have to aim for my face, you know.” Nebula smiles something playfully vicious, like Peter isn’t the only child on board after all. The curl of her lips, the movement of her jerking her chin up, the wiggle of her fingers before she forms the goal, they’re all challenging Tony. 

He lines up his shot, smirking in mirror of Nebula, and fakes a few flicks to make his opponent tense up. But when he goes to actually fire the paper toy, there’s a thud elsewhere on the ship, and he misses. Tony hurries to his feet, scrap of paper abandoned where it crashed on the floor, kicked around as he follows the source of the noise. Nebula shuffles behind him, following with equivalent apprehension. 

It’s been almost three weeks stranded up here, he believes. No way of getting to Earth—by the end of week one, Tony had resigned himself to breaking that promise of getting Peter home—and no way of getting more oxygen before it’s due to run out tomorrow. There’s no food, either; he’s uncomfortably and constantly aware of the absence of meat on his bones, since it feels as potent as the lack of optimism running around in his head. Undoubtedly, every human returning from Titan is on the brink of collapse.

As Tony traces the crash from earlier, he’s reminded of that. He finds Peter scattered against the wall. He’s kneeling, leaning on it for support, trapped between passing out and clawing to the surface of consciousness. His eyes are half lidded, but they flick around the ship, searching desperately for help. Lips dried, voice drier, he croaks a faint, “Hey, Mr. Stark.” He laughs faintly. “Got lightheaded.”

Smiling weakly, Tony replies, “Me too, buddy.” His fingers quake from malnutrition, from low blood sugar, as he reaches out to lift Peter up. His joints creak, his head swims, but he hauls them both over to the nearest set of chairs. Nebula drifts along behind them, clearly comprehending the death etched into the lines of protruding bones on their cheeks and collars. She says nothing, yet Tony can tell she tastes the fading life on the ship. With one last lingering stare, she nods and returns to the table, picking up the paper football and fiddling with it anxiously on her way back. Perhaps she’s already beginning to mourn the loss of company. 

Peter lets his hands fall between his knees when he and Tony are alone. He stares at his twiddling thumbs, and Tony notices how his watering eyes are sunken in, circled in red, and bloodshot. When he stops fidgeting, it’s only to drag his wrist up to trudge it under his running nose. God, his wrist looks so small, his whole frame seems half the size it used to be.

“I don’t wanna die,” he murmurs, lifting those depressing eyes to face Tony. His words are slurred, dunked in an alcohol that’s a mix of sleep deprivation and starvation. “There’s so much I still wanna do.” Dropping his head so it merely hangs from his shoulders like a tattered flag, low on its pole, he hugs himself and shivers. “There’s a girl I really like; I wanna ask her out. There’s a new LEGO thing Ned and I wanna build. I wanna graduate and go to college. There are people I still wanna help.” Tony lets him ramble, like he used to do on the phone calls with Happy. The ones Tony would—without telling anyone—listen to on bad days to cheer himself up. He wonders if he should tell the kid he listened to them. Now, before it’s too late. He wonders if there’s a time to throw away the last shred of hope, if that time is now. 

Should he tell Peter he’s got that picture of them both on the wall in his lab? Should he tell Peter he plans to mount it in the kitchen (maybe he’ll put it on the fridge, maybe he’ll set it on the windowsill), when he gets a house with Pepper one day? Should he tell Peter he’s got a college fund started for him? Should he tell Peter he’s got one for Ned, too? Should he tell Peter he’s been looking forward to Father’s Day for the first time he can remember, just  _ hoping _ he’ll find a letter on his desk or a phone call left in Happy’s voicemail meant for him?

Should he tell Peter he’s his son?

In all ways other than the actual genes, he is.

He settles on a heartbroken, “I know, kid.” Peter slips from the edge of his chair to the floor, leaning his head back against the seat when he lands. His bony forearm falls over his eyes. Tony places himself on the floor next to him and smooths a hand over his shoulder sympathetically. Now that Tony is down, there’s more exhaustion cluttering his shoulders; the lure of sleep coats the inside of his chest like a syrup, lulling him deeper until he shuts his eyes. Peter hiccups and Tony swallows through the silence that follows, uncomfortable with how quiet such a talkative kid is being. He sighs. “There’s a lot I want to do, too.”

Now Peter looks at him. Apprehensively, he asks, “Tell me about it?” And he looks so shattered as he asks. So frail. He looks like someone who’s dying—because he is—and there’s no way Tony can consider denying him what he’s asked. 

He deserves more from Tony than a one way trip to space.

This is the only other thing Tony can give him.

“I think I would have liked to go on one last date with Pepper,” he starts, gaze falling to his hand as he retrieves it from Peter’s shoulder. “Honestly, I would have liked to just  _ talk _ to her one last time. Maybe would have liked to smooth things over with Steve or, at least, would have liked to have had the chance.” His eyes dart as far from Peter as they can go without swiveling his head, hesitant. “And I wanted kids someday, too.” 

Peter hums and, likely delirious, he rolls his head onto Tony’s shoulder. He’s met with no opposition. The kid can do whatever he wants. There’s no point in fighting now. “I’m sorry, Mr. Stark,” he whispers. 

Tony shakes his head, tears hot and sharp at the fronts of his eyes.  _ No, I’m sorry, _ he wants to say. For bringing a child into the void of space, for not taking him home the  _ moment _ he had control of the ship. Now they’re stuck, and Peter—young and  _ sweet _ Peter—is going to die up here because Tony overestimated his own strength. Because he thought he could keep the kid safe. 

He wants to duck his head into his palms and scream. 

He thinks he’ll choke on the guilt before the air runs out.

Peter inches just a little closer, and Tony is coherent enough to realize he’s maybe a few minutes from passing out. Meanwhile, Tony has got another half hour, probably. “Would you have wanted a girl or a boy?” Against the skin of his neck, he can feel Peter’s fluttering lashes, falling longer each time he blinks. His breathing is getting slower, too.

“I know I would have been ecstatic about any kid, but I think I would have liked a daughter.” A longer hum dribbles from Peter’s mouth, trailing off. Tony wants to give him one last story on his way out. “Pepper and I could have gotten a little house by a lake after she was born, maybe. With berry bushes and a gravel driveway, with trees that have branches too high for her to climb and fall from. The lake would have had a dock and I would have taken her fishing the second Saturday of every month. We would have had a cat, probably.”

He feels Peter’s cheeks bunch against his shoulder.

“Yeah,” he slurs. “A little sister.” Something tight and scorching clutters Tony’s chest. His breathing becomes uneven, like his throat is a serrated knife, tearing the air up on its way out. It’s hot because he’s struggling to stifle the heartbroken wail bubbling in his stomach.  _ A little sister.  _ “I would have liked that, too, Mr. Stark.” There’s a bout of silence—it feels longer than it truly is—and Tony cries in the absence of sound. His tears are as silent as the rest of the ship, still restrained as he tries to hide his fear from Peter. He no longer feels Peter’s eyelids fluttering because they’re staying shut; he knows he’s losing him. The kid’s voice is groggy when he finally opens his mouth. “I think I’mma go to bed.”

“Alright.” Tony’s voice is trembling. “Goodnight, kiddo.” 

A second later, Peter’s head is heavier on his shoulder.

This time silence seizes the ship, Tony lets himself drop his head to sob loud and hard. 

Anything to fill the void Peter has left behind. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aaaaaaaa  
idk bro I got no words here just take it :')


	3. Fifty Percent

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is the last finished chapter i have y'all I'm sorry but enjoy it :')

Ten minutes later, Nebula notices the lack of conversation, and she comes in to check on Tony. Pity is palpable in her gaze, heavy, like the understanding she has for Tony’s grief. He’s sure she understands. Her relationship with her sister was rough, from what he’s heard over the last three weeks, but even if the family member lost was terrible, it hurts. Tony knows that; he knows it better than most. 

Nebula walks over with his helmet in her hands. She holds it out to him, expression blank, other than that loss in her eyes. “You wanna do another log?”  _ One last log, _ is what’s written between the lines of her question. The helmet hangs from her index finger. Tony’s hands are dripping with the tears he’d swiped from his cheeks, yet nonetheless, he grabs it, cradling it in shaking palms. 

“Thanks,” he says. The sound of his own voice is disturbing and distant, cracked and hoarse; the hatred he feels for it is palpable. He wants to hear anyone else’s voice.  _ Anyone. _ Pepper, so he could know he’s home. Happy, so he could know he’s supported. Rhodey, so he could know he’s not unbearably, painfully, wholly alone.  _ Peter  _ just so he could know the kid is awake again, just so he could know he’s alive. Tony wants, more than anything else, to have someone else here with him, but he says nothing as Nebula nods and leaves. There are no words to be spoken. Only the fractured sounds of loss. 

After smearing his tears on his cheeks and making himself look as presentable as possible while dying, he sets up the helmet to record himself. Then he sits, wordless, in front of it and its blinking red light for a while. He knows the last message is for Pepper. It has to be. Maybe he should have done the last recording with Peter, when he was still awake, so he could have said goodbye to his aunt, too. Now, the breath against his shoulder is too shallow; he knows it’s far too late for that.

He rambles to the camera. Words that aren’t exactly apologies, but that will sound like they are when they’re played back. Short explanations of where they’re at right now, how oxygen runs out tomorrow. “The kid,” he mutters, nodding his head to the mass of teenager resting on his shoulder. “I lost him to—I don’t know—malnutrition or air deprivation about half an hour ago.” He frowns, eyes burning. “He’s really just a kid, you know? I always forget how small he is until he gets hurt. He looked at me so  _ scared, _ Pep, I—” That’s all he can manage to say about Peter without having a meltdown. 

There’s so much he wants to say to Pepper, but his head is feeling lighter and lighter. Pinching his nose, he runs out of thoughts. Runs out of brain power. He signs off with a goodbye, a pessimistic joke, and a promise that he’ll miss Pepper wherever he ends up, a promise that he loves her so much. Then, clicking the feed off, he shuts his eyes and chases after the darkness crawling into his mind. 

Tony loses himself to that darkness for about an hour, he thinks. He doesn’t believe he’ll find his way back out, but when light shines over his eyelids, it attacks the void and shoves it away from him. There’s a bland, tired, cliché line playing in his head about the light at the end of the tunnel. Pursuing it like he pursued the darkness in his mind before, he flicks his eyes open. 

Peter is still asleep on his shoulder. Still breathing. It’s the only warmth in the ship right now.

Tony looks out the window, at what’s supposed to be a storm of unfamiliar stars; instead, it’s a smotheringly bright light, and he squints. It stings, so he tries to fall asleep again. Then he feels the ship lurch, forcing him awake in an instant. He suffers through an urge to jump to his feet, to rush to the window and peer out it, to find the source of the motion. The ship picks up speed, which he is certain shouldn’t be possible. They ran out of fuel weeks ago. 

He croaks something to Nebula, but she’s already on her way in. She does what Tony cannot, crossing the threshold and marching to the window. The light outside dims, though it’s still bright enough to frame her silhouette. Like a halo. Is that how salvation is pictured in books? That’s how it ought to be shown. It’s the picture of something that might be hope.

When she gets a clear look at what’s outside, her face curls in such relief Tony presumes the amount of oxygen in the ship skyrocketed in that instant. Because from a smile, from something so simple, he finds himself breathing easy. “It’s your lucky day,” she says, nothing except ease and reassurance in her tone. “Just in time.”

There may not be heaven on Earth, but it’s only because it’s up here, in space. Bringing him home.

He fears it can’t get him to Earth fast enough.

He wraps an arm around Peter’s shoulders, telling him they’ll be home soon. They’ve been thousands of lightyears from Earth for weeks, and yet they reach the compound within the hour. Peter hasn’t stopped breathing when they touch down, which Tony counts as another case of good luck. The ship opens and the air is cooler outside than inside; it lines his lungs with burning ice, but he’s grateful. It’s like he’s breathing for the first time in a month, like he’s been drowning deep in the ocean and he finally found the surface.

Relief lasts for only one breath. The need to help Peter is pulsing in his fingers, pushing him onto his feet, sending his arm out to try to help the kid up after that. He needs medical attention. He hasn’t had anything to eat, he’s  _ unconscious _ with malnutrition, but as much as Tony wants to help him, he is no better himself. Tony hasn’t eaten either, has been too plagued by stress to sleep as anything other than passing out. Even so, his heartbeat pounds with a rhythm of parental need. He  _ has  _ to help. When he bends to scoop the kid up, his legs send him staggering to one side. As much as he tries, he can’t successfully carry Peter how he is.

Nebula steadies him, tries to lead him down the ramp, and is promptly stopped when Tony repeatedly pleads, “Take the kid first. Him first. I can wait. Just—just get him to a hospital.” She narrows a stare that snags as it’s dragged away, then does as he’s said. Hefting Peter over one shoulder, she makes it halfway through the exit before Rhodey is coming up the other direction. He sighs, relieved, when he sees Tony alive and conscious. By the time the sigh is finished, he’s already got Tony up and walking—with support—to the door. 

Outside, there are a handful of people. Tony scans the crowd first for Pepper; he spots her a handful of yards away, shock and terror written on her agape lips (maybe from the weight Tony has lost, maybe from the fact that he’s alive at all). A wave of bliss slips down Tony’s cheeks like tears upon realizing she made it. Second, he looks for May. She needs to know her kid is okay.

Yet she’s nowhere around, which could mean she’s merely elsewhere, having been too far to get here in time for touchdown. 

Or it could mean she didn’t make it.

_ Fifty percent. _

Tony forces a lump down his throat and into his stomach. It knots and tangles until he’s sick.

He hadn’t been looking for Steve, but he’s there, too. When Tony’s foot hits grass instead of the metal ramp, Steve moves in front of him immediately. While dying, Tony had thought he’d want to apologize to his former friend, but now that they’re face to face, he decides he doesn’t. He grits his teeth and slips past. Nudging Rhodey to take him farther away, he doesn’t look back. “We’ll do it together, huh,” he hisses,  _ scoffs, _ under his breath. With his body turned away, he sees Steve’s hurt eyes only in his mind. They don’t bother him as much as they might have when he and Steve were teammates.

Pepper’s voice is shredded when Tony reaches her. Her eyes are foggy, her breath is uneven. She’s on the brink of a mental breakdown, he can tell. Gently, her hands come to rest on his cheeks, and she bends his head forward to kiss the tip of his nose. “Oh, God,” she breathes. Her forehead is resting on his, and when she finally drags it off, tears have drenched her lips and cheeks. Tony sets one of his own hands atop one of the ones she’s rested on his face, leaning into that hand, and shuts his eyes. In that second, he’s at peace. 

Pepper made it, Rhodey made it, the kid made it. 

That’s about as good of a loss as he could have asked for. 

Except there’s the nagging thrum of something in the base of his skull. A tap, tap, tap, telling him it’s not as good of a loss for Peter. It’s possible May is on her way, it’s possible she had merely been too far away to make it in time for touchdown. Yet Tony doesn’t think the odds are at fifty percent anymore.

After all, if even Steve could make it to the compound on such short notice, though he’d likely been across the globe… 

Where is May?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> now i gotta go to (spiderman) homecoming lol


	4. Fault

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> am i proud of this?? not rlly. am I posting it?? you betcha

About two nights ago, Tony hyperventilated at the prospect of being separated from Peter. When they tried to put Peter in the room across the hall from his own, he saw nightmares flash before his eyes. His mind was wrecked with the images it conjured of Peter waking up without him there, of Peter mourning Tony because he didn’t realize Tony made it. 

About two nights ago, Tony realized that although the compound was immense with more than enough rooms for him to have his own space, he didn’t want to be alone. Rather, he didn’t want Peter to be alone. Not after spending twenty one days way up there, in the unknown, watching the kid wither away.

About two nights ago, he thrashed in the doctors’ arms, hissing about not taking his kid away. 

About two nights ago, the doctors relented.

About two nights ago, they squeezed two beds into Tony’s room. 

Now, two mornings later, Tony sits on one of those beds, scanning the pages of a book he’s not comprehending—the words go into his head just to rattle around and fall back out a second later, forgotten. On the other bed, there’s Peter, with a steady heartbeat and a supposedly stable condition. He’s got a tube running up his nose and down his throat to feed him (Tony had gotten the same on the first night, but he’s been upgraded to Jello and stale crackers since).

On the ceiling, between the beds, Tony sees one of those curving tracks for curtains, allowing a sort of hospital style privacy. It’s privacy he doesn’t really need, privacy he certainly doesn’t want. He needs the openness of the room so he can scan the monitor next to Peter’s bed every few minutes. Though he doesn’t understand the numbers, he understands the beeping pulse, and it’s enough for him. So, he keeps that curtain of formality drawn to one side, hooked to the wall, where it sketches a block of shadows when the sun comes in through the window. 

The sun came up maybe ten minutes ago, and Tony knows in another ten, Pepper will come in for a visit. She’s done it every morning since they got home. He has determined he likes the mornings better once she walks in the door; it’s too quiet otherwise. Since Peter hasn’t woken up yet, so there’s no conversation. From the vents, he occasionally hears the clicking and buzzing of the air conditioning system, but it doesn’t feel like anything. Periodically, in the hallway outside the door, he can tell people walk past from the clopping of heels and the shuffle of his tired employees. It doesn’t feel like anything.

He notices birds don’t sing at sunrise anymore. Not like they did a month ago. The branches of the tree outside the window are mostly empty; there’s a nest on one, but it’s also empty, save for a few abandoned eggs, which look like they’re rotten. Likely left behind, cold and unable to be hatched, when half of the universe disappeared.

Tony folds the corner of his page (he doesn’t like what he’s reading anyway), closes the book, and turns to read the monitor instead.

He hopes Peter won’t turn out like the eggs. 

After a night here, he’d received the news about May. Three weeks ago, Pepper had reached out to her after seeing the footage backed up in the compound from Tony’s suit, after seeing how Peter _ should _ have fallen safely back to Earth, and after realizing he’d never landed. She’d always been bright; she’d spent enough time with Tony to know the way reckless people like him—like Peter—would do whatever was necessary to help their people. She’d realized Peter was on the ship with Tony.

She called May. The phone rang. And rang. And she went through to voicemail. She drove to the Parker’s apartment and found it empty. She drove to May’s work and no one had seen her since the attacks in New York and Wakanda. She never got a call back from May. Tony had Friday run scans on any security footage he could get his hands on, searching for her face, comparing strangers to every picture Peter had of May on his phone (he broke into it in pure desperation). Nothing came up. No matter how many times he redid the searches. May wasn’t anywhere to be found, hadn’t been seen in weeks, hadn’t shown up in another state or even another country—

She hadn’t made it.

And now, he’s certain Peter is the same as those cold eggs, left behind in the nest on the branch outside of his window. 

How is he going to break it to the kid?

Pinching between his brows, he sighs and leans against his pillow. Peter has lost so much already; he’s the _ last _ person who _ ever _ deserved to lose more. Tony hurts for him, aches, longs for things to be better. Tony hadn’t lost much this time around—he’d gotten unbearably lucky—and yet Peter had lost everything. His last family member. 

Before Peter, Tony never would have considered himself to be sufficient at the whole empathy thing, but his chest physically _ burns _ in pity now. He wishes he could engineer a solution this time, and not only because he’s terrified by the idea of telling Peter he’s lost it all, but because he knows how _ badly _that news is going to hurt him. Hurting his kid. He doesn’t want that; he never would. 

On the one hand, he wants Peter to wake up. On the other, he cringes at the conversation he’ll have to start. 

As if responding to Tony’s pulse and not Peter’s, the monitor’s beeping starts to race. Terrified, Tony sits up straight and, with a dry mouth, he watches the screen. His gaze falls to Peter on his cot, and he sees a pair of scared eyes darting around the room, laced with fear from clearly not recognizing anything. When he tries to get up, Peter’s hands fly to his face, fingers ghosting over the tubes in his nose. Grimacing, likely from having tugged them in an attempt to stand, he fiddles with them. He’s trying to tear them out, Tony realizes.

“Hey,” he calls. Peter jolts, then looks over. He soothes immediately, palm over his chest; the monitor’s blaring finally begins to slow, steadying. “When Pep comes in, I’ll ask her to grab a doctor for you. We’ll see to getting that thing out.” Blinking, a little tired and still a little horrified, Peter licks his lips like he wants to say something. After swallowing and feeling the tube down his throat, he chooses to remain silent. 

Tony stays true to his word, though he doesn’t have to ask Pepper to grab a doctor. She sees Peter awake and, after standing in the threshold, shocked, for a moment, she eagerly goes over and pats him on the cheek. Her eyes fill with tears, she bows her head, and she babbles about how glad she is that Peter is alright. Peter has never been as close with her as he is with Tony, but he’s a good kid; no one wants to see him hurt. After kissing his forehead, she rushes out of the room to find a doctor.

The doctor walks in a minute later, then leaves once she’s set Peter up with a plastic bowl of Jello instead of a feeding tube. Pepper sits in a chair between the two beds, unfolding a book in her lap and placing the bookmark on the edge of Tony’s cot. Tony pats her hand as she sets it there and she smiles at him in a pitiful way; it’s all lips and no teeth, it doesn’t reach her eyes, her brows tug together. Her eyes flicker to Peter, pointing without actually pointing, reminding Tony of the conversation he has to have. Then she turns to her book and gives them the partial privacy they need. 

Sitting up in bed, Peter pokes his Jello with his spork. It’s whole. He hasn’t eaten any of it yet, like he refuses to break the surface of it. His eyes are glassy; he already wants to cry, he’s already overwhelmed, and Tony thinks any news is going to break him. Abruptly, Peter drops his spork onto the blanket over his lap and he turns to Tony. His mouth flounders, his knuckles turn white around the edge of his bowl, his eyes become infinitely glassier. When a tear shatters the glass, the back of his hand scrabbles on his cheek to swipe it away, like he doesn’t want Tony to notice he’s crying. 

“Mr. Stark,” he starts. Tony nods. He considers swinging his legs over the side of his bed, so he can hobble over to Peter’s instead, so he can ruffle the kid’s hair and tell him he’s here. He’s here, he’s not going anywhere, Peter isn’t alone in this. But Tony doesn’t. He sits in his bed—antsy, hands sweating, and fingers fumbling with his bedspread anxiously—and he waits. Holding his breath, he waits for his kid to say what he wants to say. 

Peter watches him, though, like he’s waiting for Tony to respond.

“Kid,” Tony says, mirroring Peter’s statement from before with a smile in his voice. Peter turns away, no grin to be found.

He swallows—Tony watches a lump work its way down into his stomach—and he picks up another tear on his thumb. “I dunno if I ever told you, but I have this _ sense _ when things are going wrong. Or when they already have.” He looks up at Tony again, more pathetic than before, and Tony battles sickness when he sees how Peter’s hands are trembling. Battles the urge to run over and comfort him. The kid looks too small in his cot. “Like, I knew when that ship entered the atmosphere, even before seeing it,” Peter explains. “And that’s why I was able to find you and help—try to help—you.”

Pepper isn’t reading her book anymore. She has her eyes on it, but they’re stagnant as she pretends not to be listening to Peter’s explanation. Tony watches a tear roll down her nose and stain the page. Her empathy is written in the lines of her lips, as they curl into a frown.

“That sounds like a good thing, then,” Tony says, trailing his eyes up from Pepper and back to Peter. Peter shakes his head, cups his temples in his hands, and digs his teeth into his bottom lip so hard his jaw shakes. He rocks his head back, fingers tight in his hair, as tears fight past his clenched eyelids. 

His hands dip over his eyes, pressing hard, as he whines, “Not now, Mr. Stark. This _ stupid _ feeling won’t go away.” Tony finally decides to stand, ignoring the wary look Pepper gives him. He takes the hand she holds out to support his movement. Though his motions are shaky and he has to place half of his weight on Pepper’s hand to make it there, he manages to drop himself on the edge of Peter’s bed. Taking the Jello off of Peter’s legs, he hopes the closeness becomes the support he doesn’t have the adeptness with words to provide any other way. “I just—I have this sick feeling from how this all turned out in general, but I _ can’t _ stop worrying about—” his lungs stutter as he meets Tony’s stare. “About Aunt May.” 

Tony swallows. Peter already knows what happened. Tony _ knows _ he knows. From the hopelessness in his tone of voice, from the tears on his lips, from the pure desperation in the silence after he finishes speaking, like he’s begging Tony to tell him his gut reaction is wrong. But Tony can’t tell him he’s wrong, though the desire to lie for Peter’s peace of mind is there. It’s there and it’s agonizingly strong, almost to the point of being a need. It’s a welt in Tony’s throat, like a tumor, like a cancer he can’t quite swallow around. A restlessness he can’t speak around. He’s a deer in the headlights, unable to lie.

And the lack of denial is all the assurance Peter needs.

He crumples. Weak, crushed, broken sounds crackle from his throat as though something inside Peter’s throat is physically shattering, as though he’s coughing it up the pieces of it with his sobs. As though his heart fractured and he’s choking on it. 

He tugs his knees to his chest, curling himself to the smallest amount of space he can take up. His back and shoulders quake. “It’s all my fault,” he wheezes. “If I’d been stronger, if I’d just been able to get his glove off, if I wasn’t so stupid and useless, no one would be dead.” 

That hits Tony in the chest, in the heart, in the stomach, in the _ soul. _ Like he’s broken his spine on the sidewalk after falling from a building, like he’s been pierced by a bullet, like someone has driven a rigid knife into his gut, like they’ve twisted and curled it until he’s pleading, groveling, screeching to bleed out faster. Because he _ can’t bear to see his kid like this. _ He’d rather die.

His chest is too tight to breathe, his hands shake like they’re holding the weight of the world. They twitch forward, as though he’s strong enough to tell the kid what he thinks, as though he’s ready to tear his heart out of his chest and sew it onto the end of his sleeve. Tony knows he needs to comfort Peter, but doesn’t know what to say. There’s not a word rattling around in his skull other than the ones screaming at him to help Peter. They’re telling Tony what he already knows, that it’s not Peter’s fault.

It’s not Peter’s fault. 

_ It’s not Peter’s fault. _

None of this has ever been—none of it will ever be—Peter’s fault.

It’s excruciating to watch this child blame himself. 

This _ literal _ child. 

Tony struggles for a way to put that gut feeling into words. There’s something inexplicably awful about watching his kid break down. There’s something raw and parental he feels in his every nerve. There’s something like his own pain throbbing behind his eyes when he sees the unadulterated anguish written in Peter’s shuddering shoulders and hears it in his quivering voice. There’s something like _ need _ in the way his instincts tell him to help (because that’s _ his _ kid, it’s _ his job _ to help him; he _ has _to help him). There’s something in it all that steals his words, shatters them and tosses them out into space, to the bottom of the ocean, somewhere he’ll never be able to find them. 

So, he stops searching for words. 

Instead, he drops his arms around Peter’s shoulders. He puts all the screaming in his head, puts all the pain in his limbs, puts all his energy into the sole act of hugging the kid. It’s lopsided and they’re both still so bony it hurts, but even so, Peter’s arms lock around his spine instantly. Tony’s hand goes to the back of Peter’s head, tugging his nose to the collar of his own shirt. The motion invites Peter to cry there, tells him it’s okay to hurt, gives all the reassurance Tony couldn't find in his absent words. 

He rests his chin on Peter’s head, and he finally finds a few of his lost, crushed words.

“It’s not your fault, kid. I’m sorry you ever thought it was.” He shuts his eyes; he tries not to cry. He fails. “You’re the last person to ever deserve this. It will never be your fault.”

Tony doesn’t say it, but he feels something on the insides of his lungs. A reason. _ The _ reason. The reason it’s not Peter’s fault. 

He thinks about his allies, about their dust overflowing from his palms like a broken hourglass. He thinks about the death that has been coating his life for the last month. He thinks about finding Peter on that ship, a stowaway, and he thinks about how it’s his own fault Peter was forced to fight Thanos at all. He thinks about how, if he’d designed the suit a little better, Peter would have never been dragged to Titan in the first place. He thinks about what he could have done better. He thinks about all the ways he could have, should have, stopped Thanos. He thinks about the fall of half of the universe, how it’s all written in blood on his back.

He thinks about the reason it’s not Peter’s fault.

The reason it’s not Peter’s fault is because it’s his own.

It’s all Tony’s fault.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think I should clarify that I do not believe it was Tony's fault Thanos won!! not at all!! however, Tony would def blame himself, so that's why that last part is how it is!!
> 
> uhhh peter would 100% be able to tell immediately that May is dead because spidey senses, just saying


	5. Families Will Always Grow and Change

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> am I posting this during my break at work?? maybe so  
anyway!! this one is happier than the others have been ;) enjoy!

On the couch in the Parker apartment, Tony thinks life is generally alright. It’s cozy, the blanket around his shoulders is warm, and the flowers on the glass coffee table are a speck of brightness that detracts from what might otherwise be a lonely space. He sits on one end of the couch while Pepper sits on the other, so they brush together at the ankles, but not much else. Time passes in pleasant, serene silence, as they each do their own thing, but occupy the same space, breathe the same air. 

Tony tinkers with the tools in his lap, fixing some old trinket Peter asked him to fix this morning. A gift May had given him, Tony assumes, by how gingerly Peter had passed it over to him, and by how softly he spoke when asking if it could be fixed. Though it’s undoubtedly a toy meant for toddlers, the fragile sentiment in Peter’s eyes as he’d asked for Tony’s help told him its meaning was something deeper. A lot of things are like that to Peter.

It’s only been a few weeks since Peter received the official news about his aunt; the wound is still raw. Tony and Pepper have moved into his apartment in Queens with him since then, so they hear how late he stays up every night, wandering through the different parts of the apartment, like he’ll find some piece of her in the kitchen or in the living room. He took her sheets off of her bed and made his own bed with them. They don’t fit right, he refuses to wash them, and it’s clear he’s maybe not the best at coping, but he’s trying. 

Some nights, Tony paces to Peter’s bedroom door, sets his palm on the handle, and tightens his fingers, seconds away from turning it and walking in. Yet his muscles lock every time. His throat clenches and his knees wobble. He stares at Peter’s name on the sign that rests in the grooves of the door, written in his aunt’s handwriting. Rather than entering—rather than helping—he puts his hand on the name, on the bright red ink and the shakily drawn spider next to it, and he listens to the muffled sounds of Peter crying himself to sleep. 

More than anything, he wants to help. 

But how do you help with something like that?

Neither Tony nor Pepper have figured it out.

Instead, they do what they can do. The apartment is paid off, courtesy of Pepper a week ago. Adoption papers were filled out this morning, after Peter left for school, and Tony pressed them to the fridge with a NYC magnet about an hour ago. It’s a Friday, so when Peter comes home from school, he’ll be in for the weekend. Tony plans to talk to Peter about the process then, intends to see if adoption is even something he wants. 

Both he and Pepper are doing what they can do. They’re treading lightly, talking things over, trying not to rush in to fix the unfixable before Peter has asked them to. They’re listening when Peter needs someone to talk to. They’re helping him make up all the schoolwork he missed when he was out in space for three weeks. They’re bringing him to Ned’s place after school sometimes, bringing him to MJ’s other times, so he doesn’t isolate himself too much. They’re cooking him his favorite dinners. They’re watching his favorite movies with him.

They’re doing what they can do.

Tony is doing what he can do. 

He’s fixing a silly, little toy Peter handed him this morning because he knows it means a lot to him; he’s waiting for the kid to come home from school, so he can talk about doing something bigger. 

Just as he places the toy on the coffee table, the front door slams, and following the noise, there are footsteps and an excited shout. “It’s official, Mr. Stark!” Peter pokes his head around the corner to the living room, looks surprised when he spots Pepper on his couch, and he smiles wider upon noticing her. “Oh! Hi, Ms. Potts! Good to see you’re not working too hard at the compound!” Her lips curl in a way that makes her eyes softer, makes her attention seem sweeter, makes her whole face look more motherly; it’s a look she only gets when she looks at Peter, and it’s one of Tony’s favorite looks. The battle to turn away from that smile is hard to win, takes too long, until Pepper is the one responding to Peter’s earlier exclamation, instead of Tony.

“And what exactly is official?” She folds her arms under her chin, along the back of the couch. She has maneuvered herself to lean closer in order to look attentive; she’s always attentive when it comes to Peter. Tony does half of the same movement, burrowing one elbow into the fabric and placing his cheek on his fist. He tucks one leg under himself so he can observe Peter better. That way, he can read his body language and decide what kind of day his kid is having, whether the news he wants to share is good news, or if it’s going to have Tony rushing to polish off his suit for a fight. 

Peter smiles—a good sign—and pulls a paper out from the backpack slung over only one of his shoulders. It’s the AP Physics homework Tony helped him with last night. At the top, in orange pen, the paper says 8/10. It baffles him. He’d personally helped Peter; he feels like it deserves a solid 11/10, at least. Nonetheless, he supposes it’s a decent grade for a homework assignment, but hardly worth the fuss. He flicks his gaze away from the orange numbers, landing it on Peter’s beaming face, then he raises an eyebrow. 

Peter draws a circle with one of his arms enthusiastically. “My last make up assignment,” he explains. He shakes the paper. “Graded and everything!” Tony grins, finding something infectious about the excitement Peter feels towards the simplest things. It’s more than just contagious, though; it’s relieving. It’s reassuring to know Peter can still find that happiness in the most basic of things, even after having so much torn from him. Right now, he’s not the kid crying himself to sleep while burrowed in his late aunt’s sheets, and that’s a warm, welcome development. 

Less weight hangs on Tony’s shoulders and less dread coats his lungs, when he jumps up from the couch. Hands clapping onto his hips, he clears his throat, then begins to pace towards the kitchen. “Well!” He turns his voice into something more surprised than it is in actuality, as if the B truly  _ is _ a momentous occasion (because it is, albeit for different reasons). He puts on a show of drama to match Peter’s unending liveliness, so he can encourage it, because he wants to intensely to encourage it. He misses it when it’s gone. “I think this is cause for celebration!”

Peter’s eyes get infinitely brighter when they squish at the corners in a smile, like all that joy is squeezed into a tiny, little space. A galaxy in two chocolate pearls. 

“What do you have in mind? Shawarma?” Tony leans on the counter of the kitchen island while Peter asks. His hands sweaty as he grips the edge, and he struggles to keep his weight against the marble. With so much insufferable unease in his pulse, he is torturously aware of his own breathing, hot against his smile, as he tries to steady it.  _ Play it cool. Play it cool, Tony. He looks up to you; you have no reason to be nervous, just point him to the papers on the fridge— _ “Mr. Stark?” Peter watches him, brows low on his forehead in confusion. Dragging a hand through his hair, Tony sucks in a shaky breath. 

Pepper has trailed after him to the counter; one of her hands drifts to his back, slips up to his shoulder, and she squeezes reassuringly. In perfect timing, Tony looks over to her, and she smiles softly in the same instant. Her eyes, the tightness of her shoulders, the way she swallow all show she is as tense as Tony, but her smile is unwavering. Confident. _ You’ve got this. _

Facing Peter again, Tony taps a finger on the marble countertop. “Actually, there should be ice cream in the fridge, if you wanted to have dessert for dinner.” He nods to the section of freezer on top of the refrigerator; his eyes dip to the NYC magnet and the papers underneath, fluttering in the AC. 

Peter squints, but follows his skepticism with a smile. Moving around Tony and Pepper, he walks to the kitchen. “Really? Kinda irresponsible of you. Not very adult-like.” Tony is too panicked to respond. He’s too breathless, watching the kid get closer and closer to the adoption papers, closer to the possible rejection. 

“When have you ever known Tony to be a responsible adult, Peter,” Pepper chides. Her eyes are locked on the very same papers Tony can’t turn away from. She licks her lips, and Tony notices her thumbs are locked under the edge of the countertop, skin white at the knuckles. Though her voice is nonchalant, the rest of her is teetering towards the same skittish anticipation Tony senses in his own heart rate.

A laugh slips from Peter’s grin at Pepper’s joke, and he finally reaches the fridge. His eyes are still on Pepper, even as his fingers loop around the freezer handle. Tony almost wants to call Peter out, tell him to  _ look  _ at what he’s doing, because no more than a foot from his hand is the  _ real _ cause for celebration. He bites his tongue. Peter says, “True,” and then he turns—Tony’s gaze darts to the profile view of his face—as he murmurs, “and did you mean fridge, or did you mean freezer, Mr. Stark—”

Tony can  _ hear _ Peter’s heart clunk into his stomach. He sees his eyes widen and his fingers slip from the handle of the freezer. They land on the magnet. In that moment, the air in the room seems ten times thicker, impossible to breathe, and not one person in the apartment attempts to inhale. Not Pepper, not Peter, and certainly not Tony. 

Yet Peter is the most obvious about it, in the way his shoulders hitch up around his neck, chest not moving, lips breathlessly, soundlessly asking a question that no one but Peter can hear. With one hand, he picks up the magnet and deposits it blindly to some other place on the face of the fridge. With the other, he scoops up the pages, cradles them like they’re cracked glass, and draws them close to his face. Tony can see his eyes flitting back and forth across the top of the front page; his heart clenches when Peter’s eyes snag on the word  _ adoption _ in bold; it’s bigger than all the other words, seems bigger than Peter, bigger than even Tony Stark.

Slowly, eyes wide, Peter turns to him. “Is this for me?” He paces to the island, smooths the pages atop the marble, and his finger drags along the two signatures at the bottom (Pepper Potts and Tony Stark) and the blank spot where he has to put his own name. “This—this is for me,” he answers himself, hands dipping into his hairline to pull. There’s an inkling of a smile in his cheeks, but it’s held at bay, as though he fears the happiness will be stolen if he lets himself smile. “You want to adopt me?”

“Only if that’s what you want, kid,” Tony says. He holds eye contact, keeps his lips an indifferent line—not quite a smile—for much the same reason he suspects Peter is hiding his own grin. 

Something like a scoff slips from Peter’s almost-smile. “ _ If _ that’s what I want? Mr. Stark, with all due respect, why  _ wouldn’t  _ I—” He makes a garbled noise, breaking his sentence off to buzz his lips, and it sounds a little like what Tony imagines Peter’s keyboard smashes sound like when they text. From under the overhang of the island, Peter drags out a stool. He tosses himself into it, dropping his elbows on either side of the adoption papers, and he presses the heels of his palms onto his eyebrows. More unintelligible syllables catch in his throat when he tilts his head downward to laugh against those papers. “Dude, you’re my idol, obviously there’s nothing I would like more than that.” Lifting his head, he reveals the uncertainty in his eyes. “Are you sure, though, because that’s, like, a lot of responsibility and you’re not by any means obligated to—”

Tony sighs—silencing Peter—and his smile finally slips past his defenses, unabashed, uncontrolled. He stops gripping the counter like its his last hold on life. “I’m sure, Pete,” he says.  _ There’s nothing I’ve been more sure of. _ “We’re sure.” He gestures to Pepper with his head, wraps an arm around her waist while she, in turn, secures her hand around his opposite shoulder. 

Beaming, Peter scrambles for a pen in the cup on the island, and he fumbles with it when he tries to click it. His signature on the page is sloppy, shaky, doesn’t quite fit on the line right, but it’s there. It’s the last missing piece before they turn it in, the final step, the only remaining obstacle. And it’s  _ there. _

Tears burn at the front of Tony’s eyes as he backs away from the counter. Pepper moves with him, her arm still around him. He laughs, something watery and thrilled, and lifts his arms in invitation. “C’mere then,” he pauses, voice goofier than it had been a moment prior,  _ “son.” _

Pepper and Peter both simmer with soggy laughter, but Peter surges forward anyway, one arm winding around Tony’s neck and the other swinging around Pepper’s shoulders. “Stop, stop! You sound like Captain America!” More laughter fills the room, and Tony thinks the apartment sounds happier in this one instant than every other instant, since he moved in, combined. The giggling and snorting echo off the walls and in his ears, almost liquid, like a warm apple cider in his veins. Yet somehow, it’s still Peter’s chin over his shoulder and Pepper’s arms around both Peter and himself that make him as happy as he is, not the infectious laughter. 

It’s not the noise, or the joy, or the smiles.

It’s the feeling of something he’s always been searching for

It’s the feeling of a family.

And he relishes in it—is perfectly content relishing in it—for a few minutes. Just laughing and sharing body heat in an uneven huddle in the middle of the kitchen. It’s comfortable, familiar, despite how new it  _ should _ feel. But he supposes it has been a long time coming; not really that new at all. 

Slowly, the excitement mellows out. Peter keeps his chin tucked over Tony’s shoulder, temple resting against Pepper’s, and he whispers, “Hey, Mr. Stark?” Tony feels there is a conversation about titles in order, but nonetheless, he pushes the envelope on that discussion a little; he hums to urge Peter’s question onward. “Do you think she’d be okay with it?”

He means his Aunt May. Tony knows that’s who he means. Pushing the kid back, he smiles. “She’d want you to be happy. I know she would. I promise.” Peter nods, wobbles on his feet, teeters like he wants a different reassurance, but wouldn’t dare to ask for it. His eyes won’t meet Tony’s or Pepper’s. When he folds his hands in front of his torso, pinching one of his thumbs beneath the other, Tony finally recognizes what it is Peter is asking for. Gently, he sets his hand on Peter’s head, smiling twice as tenderly as he ever has, and he whispers, “She’d be so proud of you, kid.”

His words settle deep in his own chest, as much as they land in the lines at the edges of Peter’s newest smile. Tony had wanted to hear those words, too, growing up; seeing how delighted Peter’s expression becomes after hearing them almost makes the years of missing out on them himself worth it. The tears in the kid’s eyes are elated. So much so, that Tony feels them in his own eyes, too. 

Peter hugs Tony and Pepper tighter than before. 

“Thank you both so much.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cryin in the club y’all


	6. Paying Homage

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don’t have WiFi, and I’m out of state, but uh my flight home was delayed so!! I figured I would edit the next chapter while I was waiting!! so here’s the update that’s been entirely written, edited, and posted on my phone rip  
enjoy!!!

“I can’t believe you brought me to Maine for spring break, Mr. Stark.” Peter drags the collar of his jacket over his nose, keeping his shoulders tight around his red, frozen ears. His hands dip into the pockets at the front of his jacket, and when his head tilts back, it’s to squint at the flaking snow. It melts when it hits the ground and it leaves dewdrops on Peter’s cheeks, but Peter’s body language as he glares at it makes it clear he still thinks the snow—the weather in general—is too cold. “Couldn’t we have gone somewhere warm? I can’t believe you chose  _ Maine, _ man.” 

Tony slaps Peter’s backpack. “And  _ I _ can’t believe you brought your schoolwork, but here we are.” Even so, he has to admit, if only to himself, that Peter is right. It’s too damn cold. Slyly, so Peter won’t notice the agreement in the action, Tony pretends to cough into his fist, only to warm his fingers. “Pepper wanted to see puffins, kid, and you do  _ not _ mess with a pregnant lady’s wishes.” 

After twitching his nose, and begrudgingly huffing, “There aren’t even puffins until summer,” Peter nods. “Hence our current run to the convenience store,” he says, in reference to Pepper’s most recent request. She’d been craving peanut butter, apparently, and the hotel didn’t have any in the store downstairs. But at eight months pregnant, she was not someone Tony wanted to return to empty handed, so he’d fired her a quick text saying he and Peter were on their way to the store. And here they are now, both hurrying along the street in search of peanut butter. Specifically, the smooth kind. Any other variety and Pepper would probably kill them both. Or cry. Neither would be ideal.

“Hence our current run to the convenience store,” Tony agrees.

It’s been eight and a half months since he and Pepper adopted Peter. They’re still living in the Parker apartment, for the most part (Tony doesn’t intend to drag Peter out until it’s time for college, if even). They’ve all been doing better with the whole coping thing; Peter finally washed May’s sheets, and the number of times Tony hears him crying alone in his room has dwindled to about three times a month. Tony thinks he can live with that number. 

Peter is ecstatic about Pepper’s pregnancy; he has been since the moment he found out. While Tony isn’t sure, he believes a lot of his excitement comes from the fact that he’s an only child—an orphan, at that—and he’s constantly reaching out to grasp onto some semblance of family. He had latched onto Tony so  _ quickly _ upon meeting him, hiding his attachment behind the flimsy, transparent title of  _ Mr. Stark. _ Then again, Tony would be lying if he were to say he hadn’t clung to Peter as hastily, veiling his own fondness behind a similar nickname of just  _ kid. _

Pepper has taken the whole situation in stride. She always does. Quick to adapt, that one. Probably comes with the territory of being close to Tony Stark, someone quick to change his mind. She doesn’t mind how easily Peter has been accepted into their life, perhaps because she’s simply that welcoming, motherly, and nice, but Tony wants to chalk some of that up to the kid. He’s impossible  _ not _ to adore. He has manners like a saint, instincts that are unfathomably generous, and a smile that’s more contagious than the flu. And not to mention the puppy eyes (they make Tony question whether or not he’ll be able to deny his daughter anything, if he can’t even turn a teenage Peter down). 

Even beyond merely adopting Peter, Pepper has done excellently. There’s more to taking care of a kid than keeping a roof over his head and making sure he eats and goes to bed every night. When he smiles with his round, watery eyes, and asks if he’s allowed to put his hand on her stomach, she smiles back, with that boundless tenderness in her eyes. She says yes with all the happiness of a mother-to-be on her features. Tony sees her and knows his understanding of parents, of what they do, wasn’t quite correct until he saw Pepper and Peter interact. He’s grateful to have gotten the chance. Looking over at Peter, being reminded of the willingness with which he had agreed to fly up to Maine in February all for Pepper, Tony can tell Peter is grateful for the chance, too.

Perhaps he is not as grateful for the staggering distance between their hotel and the closest store, however. 

It’s just  _ intolerably _ cold!

Upon entering the store, Peter is lightning fast to usher Tony in after him, wobbling back and forth between his feet in a fruitless effort to warm himself up. He breathes into his hands as he treads to the aisle with the peanut butter. It hardly stays in his trembling fingers, so he slips it into the crook of his elbow (a little like holding a baby, Tony observes, uncertain of whether that says more about Peter’s excitement or his own, for merely observing such an obscure connection). They wait their turn in line, and just as Tony places a ten dollar bill into the palm of the employee, he feels his phone buzz once in his back pocket. He ignores it, making pleasant conversation with the woman behind the counter, until he feels another buzz. And another. 

Then it starts to ring. 

Irritated, he fishes the damned thing out of his jeans, fumbling to get it to his ear as he accepts the call without reading the caller ID. He immediately recognizes Happy on the other end of the phone, muttering something that sounds halfway panicked. Tony can hear his own voice slip into the same alarm as he quips, “Hello?” His pulse is heavy as he steps away from the counter, leaving Peter to collect the change. His pulse is  _ too _ heavy, and he swears he can taste it under his tongue as he swallows, knows he’s drowning in his own heartbeat, with how  _ hot _ he suddenly feels. He’s not breathing like he should be, either. Because Happy is back at the hotel room with Pepper, and if Happy is as hysterical as he sounds, what does that say about her? “Happy, you had better tell me what’s going on right now, or I swear—”

He clenches his jaw and his fist as Happy all but screams on the other line. It’s not a word, just a drawn out shriek that has Tony itching to bolt back to the hotel room. After yelping, Happy is once again muttering to himself, though this time it sounds like he’s carrying something or—Tony feels a wave of ice in his bloodstream—dragging something. Happy’s breathing is ragged, as he says, “Okay. Okay. You’re okay,” into the phone, clearly not in reference to Tony. Or at least Tony  _ hopes _ it’s not in reference to Tony, or Happy might just find himself out of a job with just how condescending that would be.

Hissing, Tony gestures to Peter, and shouts, “Keep the change,” to the woman at the register. Peter waves apologetically to the lady, before scrambling to grab the peanut butter and rushing to Tony. His eyes are wide and full of questions, but Tony nudges him out the door. They walk at a much brisker pace this direction, into the wind, and Peter searches for all his answers through the half of the phone conversation he can hear. Tony doesn’t take the time to explain his own confusion. “Happy,” he snaps. “What the  _ hell _ is going on over there? Is everyone okay?”

When he takes another breath to pile on more questions, Happy interrupts him to blurt, “Pepper’s water broke.”

Tony’s phone almost cracks against the pavement, but Peter catches it before it can. Fast reflexes. Adapting quickly. Everyone adapts so much better than Tony. He’s not ready. He feels that thought thrum in his head, a cursed reminder. He’s not ready for this. Another month, he thought he had  _ another month.  _ God! 

Peter passes the phone to Tony, scanning the shock on his features as he does. Drawing the object back to his ear, Tony can’t breathe around his own words. “It—She—I—” Tony brings cold fingers to the bridge of his nose and pinches, before swiping his palm down his face entirely. Exhausted. Frantic.  _ Scared. _ “It’s only been eight months, Happy, are you sure the baby didn’t, just, kick her bladder?” 

“I  _ know  _ it’s only been eight months! I’m not a genius like you, but I can  _ count,  _ you know,” Happy bites. There’s more shuffling, the ding of an elevator door, and all the while, Tony can pick up on a few choice words Pepper is spewing in the background.

Frustrated, Tony mutters, “I know you can count, but are you absolutely  _ certain _ that’s what it is?” He shrugs. “There’s no judgement here for baby-induced urination—”

He hears a terrible scuffling sound as Pepper takes the phone. “Yes, we’re fucking sure that’s what it is, Tony!” 

Though he knows no one but nosy strangers on the sidewalk and Peter can see, Tony raises his free hand defensively. “Okay, okay, okay. Alright. Alright. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Okay. This is—I—Oh, God.” 

“You’re panicking, Mr. Stark,” Peter says, furrowed brows making it clear he doesn’t mean it in a condescending way. Tony makes an inhuman noise and shoots Peter a look that says,  _ yes, I know,  _ before Peter gently reaches out to take the phone. He slips it between his shoulder and his ear as he passes the peanut butter to Tony. “Trade you,” he says, then he warily begins to speak into the phone. “Happy? What’s going on?”

It’s still Pepper, and Tony can tell because he hears her shriek, “Meet you at the hospital in ten!” The line goes dead as soon as her demand is finished. Peter looks confused, like a kid who has lost his mother in the middle of a supermarket. Maybe like he’d wandered into the feminine supply aisle immediately after. There’s something almost comedic about the face he makes, about the raw emotion in the curve of his lips and the wideness of his eyes as he stares at Tony’s phone. But more than looking amusingly confused, he merely looks horrified. 

And Tony is far too afraid to find humor in any of it anyway. 

“Hospital,” Peter echoes. “Is she okay, Mr. Stark? What did Happy say? What’s going on?” He drags his nails along his scalp, clenching Tony’s phone tight with his other hand. “Which hospital, Mr. Stark? Is she gonna be okay?”

Tony switches the peanut butter for his phone again, weakly croaking, “Deep breath, kiddo. We can’t  _ both _ be panicking.” Peter somehow contorts his face to look even more horrified. More lines between his eyebrows, more water on the brink of spilling from his eyes, more emotion than Tony can handle. He feels overwhelmed from simply looking at the kid. His pulse feels too thick again, throat feels too small, clothes feel sticky and itchy against his skin, and his eyesight is smudged. Turning to his phone and opening Google Maps, he feigns calmness with an answer. “Her water broke. She’s gonna be fine, Pete. Kids are born a whole month early all the time, right? Yeah. Yeah, that’s definitely a thing. It’s fine. Normal. Uhuh.”

Peter nods, faking the same nonchalance, while his tone and his hastening pace give him away. “Yeah, I think Aunt May was born a month early. She turned out fine. Yeah, this will be fine. This is fine.” 

After pulling up the directions to the closest hospital, Tony and Peter run there. They rush to the receptionist, ask if a blonde, hysterical, pregnant lady has come in within the last ten minutes. They receive a negative response, so they relocate themselves to the waiting area, anxiously watching the door. 

“Oh, God. Oh, God.” Tony paces on the waiting room floor, running a groove into the pristine, white tiles. The stares of strangers in the hospital are like rays of scorching sunlight on his shoulders and on his face; he feels too hot, even with the drafts of icy air coming in from the street. In his panic, he misses New York. New York has the compound and his own private hospital, where no one can watch him melt down in the lobby. But he’s in Maine and New York is out of reach, the distance making it more or less overkill for the situation. He’s always been a bit of a drama queen; he’s always  _ thrived _ on overkill, so he thinks he might as well head back regardless. It’s what everyone would expect anyway. For him to call a suit and fly everyone home.

Peter sits on one of the couches, the one closest to the receptionist, and he has his laptop out, probably intending to write up a report that’s due after his break ends. His backpack sits dutifully half open between his ankles, which are bouncing to an unsteady beat. He drums his fingers on the plastic next to the mouse pad, eyes glued to the clock over the front desk. Tony is sure, if he were to lean his head to the other side of the monitor, he would see the cursor blinking fruitlessly in an empty document. 

They’re both just as deep in anticipation.

Tony’s eyes can’t seem to drift anywhere other than the clock on the wall and the clock on his phone. He has to stop himself from asking Friday for the time, telling her to recount how long it has been since Pepper told them to meet her here. It’s possible they're at the wrong hospital, it’s possible he’s not there for her, it’s possible he’s missing the first important moment of his daughter’s life. The thought makes him sick, and he lowers himself onto the ground by Peter’s backpack. He can’t make it to the closest chair.

“I'm not ready,” he says aloud. He folds his hands in his lap, atop his legs, knotted into a pretzel and hooked at the ankles. Wrenching his fingers around each other until his fingertips turn burgundy, he grinds his teeth. “I can’t do this. I wanted to have Friday get me more articles and books on parenting, I wanted to ask Barton for help. I had a month. I’m not—God, I can’t.” 

The room is a handful of illnesses in a blender, buzzing loudly with coughs and sneezes and wheezes and crying kids. He’s overwhelmed by the sounds, but he’s thankful for them in this moment, when he’s sure he’d freeze up without them. In silence, he’d feel too  _ watched _ to melt down in here, in the waiting room; he’d have to run outside and collapse on the slushy sidewalk, shaking in the cold, hacking sobs into his palm. But the noises make him feel lost, just lost enough that he feels he can break down here, on the floor, without anyone noticing.

Except Peter, who folds his laptop and taps his index finger on the edge a couple times. “I think you’re ready,” he supplies. “I mean, you’ve had practice.” There's a pause. “Between me and Nebula and Harley and all the kids whose lives you’ve saved in the suit, I think you’ve gotten more practice than any book or article could offer.” He scratches the back of his neck, sweeps his fingers around his ear, and trails his eyes to the bag between his ankles. “I know you and your dad didn’t… click. But I think you know more about dad-ing intuitively than you give yourself credit for.” 

Tony stares at the sheepish way Peter purses his lips like he might have more to say. The nervous lump he’s been rolling around in the pit of his stomach begins to recede, but the lack of conclusion on Peter’s countenance throws him off. Keeps some of that dread around. He cautiously urges, “Peter?”

“I mean,  _ I _ think you’re doing really well. I never—I mean—when I lost May, I didn’t know what was gonna happen, and then you and Ms. Potts just stepped in, and I think… I think that’s because you’re both ready. And just instinctively parents. I dunno.” Peter rolls words around in his head for a few seconds, eyes sweeping the room, like he’s looking for them. When he clenches his eyes shut, he drags those words to his lips. “I don’t remember my dad. I guess what I’m trying to say is that you may not  _ think _ you’re ready to be a dad, but to me, you’ve been one for a while.”

Tony’s chest tightens, in a drunken way, and he can’t stop the smile widening on his face. He doesn’t want to, despite the terror he’d previously felt in this situation. The dread fades, replaced with something like butterflies or TV static, or the carbonation from soda in his gut. He stands up, so he can lean closer to Peter. “Kid…” His arms twitch by his sides to wrap around Peter’s shoulders in a hug, but he hears the door swing open. 

Pepper and Happy hobble in, the former hanging off the latter’s shoulder. The previous conversation is marked down in Tony’s mental calendar for later, as he rushes to help his wife. Peter shoves his laptop into the bag between his ankles and stumbles after them.

It takes over nine hours before everything calms down again. 

Tony stands to one side of Pepper’s bed. She’s asleep on it, totally conked out, and so the baby—Morgan—was passed over to Tony a while ago. He finds it especially hard to look elsewhere. Part of it is anxiety, like if he loses sight of his daughter, she might get swapped for another kid while he’s unaware. Another part of it is pure, unwavering adoration. She’s smaller than most babies as a result of being born so early, but she’s so, so,  _ so _ cute. There’s a lot of himself in her face—in her eyes and in the dark shade of the peach fuzz along the top of her head—and he swears it’s not just narcissism making him love her to such endless bounds. 

She’s small and she’s depending on him.

Ten hours ago, that thought made his knees give out, made his head spin, but now the thought makes his cheeks hurt from grinning, instead. For eighteen whole years, this beautiful, sleeping, soft bundle of baby blankets and baby fat is going to depend on  _ him.  _ He promises himself he’s going to be better than his father because looking at this infant, he can’t imagine being anything less than perfect. It wouldn’t be right. His daughter is brand new to the world, completely innocent, never made a wrong choice in her life, and it would be wrong to give her anything short of everything he can offer.

While he’s leaning his face close to swish his nose along her cheek, footsteps creep up on his side. Peter had stepped out hours ago, too overwhelmed by all the screaming and crying and pain. It might have been “spidey senses” or it might have been pure anxiety, but he shook his head about five minutes into the ordeal, and scurried out the door. He approaches now, but his motions are wary, like a cat slowly inching out from hiding under the bed. 

His head pops up over Tony’s shoulder, admiring the sleeping newborn. Carefully, he moves his index finger to her cheek, pokes once, and then draws it back. Tony laughs, quiet and exhausted. 

“She’s very small,” Peter notes. “And very sleepy.” He wiggles his finger toward her again, nearly jumping to the ceiling when she subconsciously grips it in her hand. Then he stiffens, a rigid pole run up his spine, as he harshly whispers, “Oh, her fingers are so tiny. Oh, golly. Like, like,  _ so _ tiny, Mr. Stark. Is that okay? Are they supposed to be that tiny?” Peter makes no motion to take his finger away. Rather, he uses his other hand to prod along her head. Between the ridges of her eyebrows, the tip of her nose, the chubbiest parts of her cheeks.

Again, Tony chuckles. “She was born a month early, so that’s why she’s so small, but she’s okay. Other than being smaller than average, everything seems to be in working order.” He shifts Morgan in his arms, and she releases Peter’s finger in response. The look of betrayal on Peter’s face is equal parts amusing and tragic. “You wanna hold her?”

Peter shifts his gaze to Tony, eyes wide and horrified. “I can  _ do _ that?! What if I drop her, Mr. Stark?” He yelps when Tony starts to pass Morgan over anyway. “No, no, stop it!” But he holds his arms out nonetheless, cupping Morgan to his chest as soon as her weight in his hands. He has his elbows bent awkwardly, like he wants to hold her out in front of him, like he thinks she is a frog about to pee. For a while, his shoulders shake and his lips fumble around quiet, panicking sounds, but eventually he settles. His nose tucks in close to Morgan’s, and he smiles the gentlest smile Tony has ever seen him smile. Now, the noises he makes are soft and cooing. “You’re not even crying, huh? You too sleepy? Uhuh, sleepy baby! Takin’ a nappy-time like your mom, huh? Yes you are!”

Clapping a hand on Peter’s shoulder, Tony says, “You’re doing great, kid.” Then, he moves for the door. Peter swivels his head to follow, fretting again, until Tony chuckles and explains. “Pep says I’m not allowed to take my eyes off her. She’s worried someone’s gonna swap Morgan for another kid. And I—Peter, I  _ really _ have to pee. It has been, what,  _ ten _ hours? That’s, like, the decade of hours.”

Features hardening, Peter nods. “You can count on me! I’ll take over Morgan-watching duty.” 

Tony shoots him a thumbs up and a pair of finger guns, before he jogs to the bathroom. It’s by no means a leisurely pace (he already wants to spend as much time with Morgan as he can), but he’s far too tired to sprint. A couple nurses double take upon seeing him; he doesn’t pay them much more mind than a simple wave. He has a one-track mind and it’s leading him, in a rush, to the men’s room.

After emptying his ten-hour-full bladder and splashing water on the dark circles under his eyes, he paces back to Pepper’s hospital room. The door is still open, so he can see nothing is on fire yet, and he counts that as a win. He pokes his head into the doorway first, and sees Peter seated atop the chair in the corner of the room. 

The way he holds Morgan is less stiff now, maybe simply because he hasn’t noticed Tony watching him yet, and he’s still whispering gentle, meaningless words to the baby. He puckers his lips, wrinkles his nose, and makes all sorts of noises. Buzzing his lips, he changes them into words. “Morgan Stark,” he says. “That’s a cute name, yeah? Morgan Stark!” He draws the name out that time, puffing his cheeks out to seem goofy. “Yes! That’s you! Yes, Morgan Stark!” She’s asleep, but Tony wishes she wasn’t, because he’s certain she would giggle and gurgle at Peter’s faces as he speaks. “Morgan Stark!”

Tony leans on the doorframe and makes himself known by adding, “May.” Peter looks up at him, ears flushed red from being caught. His brows muddle together, clambering awkwardly to the center of his face, and he tilts his head in confusion. “Morgan May Stark,” Tony clarifies. “Pep and I talked about it. We didn’t really have a middle name picked out, and we figured it would be a nice, little bit of recognition for your aunt.” 

Peter is silent. Tony can see him swallow. He can see he is at a loss for words. 

“Is that… okay?” 

No words come from the corner, no sounds other than breathing and the scuffing of nurses down the hall. Tony feels too watched, wants to rush outside to melt down. Had he misread what would be okay? Was Peter upset? He had overstepped, hadn’t he? 

For a while, he’s had his arms crossed over his chest, hands tucked under his biceps, but now he curls his fingers into nervous fists. He watches Peter stare blankly at his newborn. Tony can feel his pulse in his throat. He can hear it in his ears. His mouth is dry.

“Mr. Stark, can you c’mere?” Peter asks. He doesn’t look up from Morgan, and the lack of clarity in his unreadable expression has Tony’s palms sweating. His face isn’t angry and it isn’t sad, but it doesn’t seem happy either. It seems almost lost or vacant. 

Tony pushes off from the doorframe. “Of course, kid.” He crosses the room, attempting to keep his pace normal, yet it seems too slow and too fast all at once. A few seconds pass like centuries, mulling over what he could  _ possibly _ do to correct how much he messed up by naming his flesh and blood something so clearly unwanted. And what could he say to smooth things over with this teenager, whom he’d so gravely insulted? 

Yet once his shoes clack into place in front of where Peter is seated, it doesn’t matter. 

Standing up, Peter passes Morgan to Tony, then uncomfortably wiggles his arms around Tony. They’re stuffed under where Tony holds Morgan, but still where they can clearly be seen as something  _ meant _ to be a hug. Tony thinks, that if he weren’t holding his newborn, Peter would have squished himself right up to his chest, chin over his shoulder, arms right around his back.

He  _ knows _ it’s a hug, and yet he still can't make his voice box squeeze out anything other than a slightly irritated, “What are you doing?”

Peter doesn’t seem bothered. “You didn’t have to do that, Mr. Stark.” Tony shrugs, unable to voice his thoughts by returning the hug, and lungs still not quite working enough to actually speak. “I mean it. You didn’t have to… I’m grateful, obviously, and I’m sure Aunt May would be, too, but…”

“We knew we didn’t have to,” Tony whispers, wanting more than anything to have his arms free to hug Peter. He feels tears, hot and loving, behind his eyes, so he slams them shut. The word  _ family _ swarms his head like a flock of seagulls on the boardwalk, loud and  _ almost _ obnoxious. And yet, exactly like the seagulls on the boardwalk, things wouldn’t be the same, wouldn’t feel right, without his family. “But we know how much she means to you. And… that’s what family does, Pete. We do our best to honor what matters to one another.” 

Peter leans back, wiping his eyes with his wrist and leaking more tears down his cheeks. How long had he been crying? “Heh,” he garbles, irises glassy and ringed in red, “look at you! Talking about family and stuff. Never thought I’d see the day!” He laughs—the sound is watery and uneven—and sniffles. For a few seconds, he gets uncharacteristically quiet. Fearfully, he looks away and draws his hands together in front of his stomach. His thumbs twiddle. His voice is weak when he asks, “Am I really family, Mr. Stark?” 

Sighing, Tony smiles. 

He echoes the Peter from ten hours ago, antsy, shy, and caring in the waiting room.

“You may not  _ think _ you’re a member of our family yet, but to me, you’ve been one for a while.”

Tony thought the smile he saw Peter give Morgan before was the gentlest and the most loving. 

But the one that splits his face now, as tears catch on the swells of his cheeks and soggy laughter bubbles from his stomach, is _so _much more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please comment and kudo—my children need food. we are starving. your comments and kudos are the only food they will eat. please.  
also a lot of this is based off of me when I was born!! I did not cry!! I went straight to sleepy time!! I was born a month early!! I was very tiny!! uh yeah just fyi!! this is semi realistic!!


	7. Nothing Comes For Free

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CHRISTMAS IS HERE EARLY YALL YOURE WELCOME  
and I’m sorry!! I changed the number of planned chapters cuz I split one into two!!!

As it so happens, since moving into the cabin, away from the busy sounds of the compound, Tony decidedly likes the rain more. It seems less like extra trouble and noise now that he’s out here. In fact, he likes rain so much more, that when he’d had the cabin built, he’d asked for one room with long, glass windows all the way around. On days like today—when the rain comes down in slow, cold waves and trickles through the pine trees—he seats himself in that glass room. Sits down on the couch cushions, drapes his arms over the back of the sofa, and watches raindrops smear his clear view of the lake and the forest, blurring it all to a half-complete watercolor painting. 

Sometimes, he’ll pop open one of those long windows, so it’s just the screen between him and the rain. He’ll breathe and hear the storm in the room with him, let thoughts of serenity settle into the forefront of his mind. Cold air will seep into the couch cushions and he’ll drag a blanket over his lap. Maybe he’ll slip into the kitchen and mix lemon juice with honey and hot water, like his mom used to make for him, and though it’ll never taste as good as hers, he’ll sink into the couch with his newfound warmth all the same. 

Today, he skips the tea, but he thinks of it and can almost taste it on his lips.

Pepper has acoustic music playing somewhere else in the house. The hallways smell like chocolate and brown sugar from when she and the kids had made cookies earlier. There are three tracks of muddy footprints leading from the door to Tony’s groove in the couch. He’d promised Pepper he’d clean them up while he and the kids were making them, but the doubt hd been shimmeringly clear in her eyes. On his thigh, rests the head of an exhausted twenty year old boy, hair half soaked and mouth flopped open to snore. Said boy has his arms looped around a much smaller kid; the four year old girl sleeps with her cheek on his collarbone, arms around his neck like some strange variety of sloth. 

Tony smiles at them both, observes them with a passive, gentle affection in his chest. Outside, in the drizzle, the world fights to move on while mourning a disaster that turns five years old this fall. But in here, with Pepper reading somewhere else in the cabin, with Peter back from college for the weekend, with Morgan snuggled up on the couch with them both, Tony’s world stands still. He sighs and lets go of the mourning and the guilt for an hour or two, thinking instead about how lucky he is, how much he loves his family. This is the new life he’s built for himself. Even someone as imperfect as he is has the right to enjoy this.

Yes, he likes the rain more here, with them, than anywhere else.

Half an hour ago, he, Peter, and Morgan had all been playing tag outside. Pepper left the door open to hear them from her seat in the living room. A few times, Tony had caught her watching them instead of reading, fondness in her soft eyes and smiling cheeks. She’d laughed at how they’d been kicking up dirt and throwing pinecones, ducking around trees and hiding in the shed. Tony had tagged Peter and scooped Morgan out of his reach, so he would have no way to tag her. The whole group had been laughing; Pepper had shouted for Tony to play fair, but she’d been chuckling, too. 

The rain had started to drip through the tree branches and they had all sprinted inside, mud on their shoes and pine needles in their hair. But even then, they’d been laughing, out of breath and in high spirits. They had trudged to the couch in the glass room to pass out, in close proximity, until dinner. 

So, Tony sits there now, with both his kids close enough to brush his fingers through their hair whenever he wants. Their shirts are soaked on the shoulders, and Peter’s hair is leaving a drenched, dark spot on Tony’s jeans, but he still thinks he’s so lucky. They’re a mess, but they’re his family. He is beyond lucky to have them. 

Every single day, he is reminded of that. Tony looks into Morgan’s eyes and he’s reminded of it. (He sees the way she stares up at him like he knows the answer to everything in the universe; like in that moment, he’s all that matters, like he’s her whole world.) Peter calls him on the phone from his dorm room and he’s reminded of it. (He hears the excited way Peter tells him about his chemistry labs or favorite teachers; he can feel the smile in his voice when he talks about rooming with Ned and MJ; he knows Peter is crying tears of joy when he thanks him for the college fund and for everything Tony has done.) Pepper chats with him as they lie on their bed at night and he’s reminded of it. (She talks about a book she’s reading, recalls a scene in it that reminded her of Tony; she rambles about a new hobby she thinks she wants to pick up; she leans her head on his chest and stares up like she’s watching the stars, and Tony knows she’s thinking about Morgan and Peter, without her having to say a word.)

He’s more than lucky or fortunate or blessed.

And he’s not sure there’s a word for what that is.

Pepper paces from the living room to Tony’s couch in the glass room, rests her hands on his shoulders, and bends forward to kiss the crown of his head. He smiles and tilts his head back when she pulls away. His hands lift to his shoulders, removing her hands, so he can tangle their fingers together. When he’s done that, he continues to smile, while his thumb absentmindedly curls around her hand to twirl her wedding ring. She smiles in return, taking one hand away from his to fiddle with his bangs instead. She pulls them off his forehead, parting them one way, then another, then ruffling them.

Her nails draw circles on his scalp as she speaks. “I guess you all had a good day, huh?” Tony hums, shutting his eyes sinking further into the couch. Pepper’s voice is all kinds of soft, like it’s nothing more than extra rain on the window panes and the roof; merely soft, pattering noises falling gracefully to the earth. The sound of her breathing is liquid in Tony’s ears, pooling in his chest in a way he can only describe as love. “I hope the rain didn’t ruin it,” she adds. 

Faint and infatuated, Tony laughs. His eyes slowly open once more, scanning the edges of Pepper’s face, smoothed over by her tender smile. And his lips curl to match; his fingers thoughtlessly hold hers tighter. “Nah, I like how it all turned out.” He lifts his head from where it has dipped into the cushions, only to change his view from Pepper’s jawline to the dripping sweeps of his kids’ hair. 

Tony knows she understands he had meant something deeper by  _ I like how it all turned out. _

Tangled in limbs and messy, auburn curls, his family looks sloppy. Yet they appear flawless, serene, and satisfied enough to star in the center of a picture frame or a Hallmark card. Or a month in one of those Puppies and Kittens calendars, all snuggled up and cute. He’s certain that if he were asleep, Pepper would have snuck in to take pictures, instead of to chat. Well, there’s still time for that, he supposes.

Gingerly, Tony reaches out and combs his fingers through Morgan’s hair. Hushed enough so she won’t wake up, he murmurs, “How could I not?” Pepper sighs. It’s an agreeable, lovestruck noise, telling Tony she’s observing the same scene of snoozing children and drawing the same blissful conclusions of luck. More than luck. 

“Tell me about it.” Tony shifts his gaze back to her as she speaks. He fiddles with her wedding ring again. “I’m gonna go make something for dinner. I’ll wake you and your little dogpile up when it’s done.” When Tony nods, she begins to move away, but Tony holds fast to her hand, refuses to give it up yet. She doesn’t complain. She stands, no tension in the arm kept only partially by herself and mostly by Tony, no resistance or desire to leave. 

“I love you,” Tony says, stolen by the scene and the moment. The sound and smell of the rain mix with thoughts of his day with Peter and Morgan, until he can’t help the bubble of affection in his chest. He can’t keep from wanting to climb up to the roof only to shout his gratefulness into the empty woods. Though he’s never been the most affectionate person, with his life as perfect as it is, he can’t stop the change in heart. He can’t resist any of it, but he doesn’t want to. For once, he doesn’t mind openly caring about people. 

Pepper smiles; it’s all the same tenderness Tony simmers in his chest and laces into his words. Kissing his scalp again, Pepper says, “I love you, too.” Then, she’s off to the kitchen, and Tony hears her acoustic music swell before the sounds of cooking join the pitter of the rain. He folds his hands on his stomach, content with everything in that moment.

He doesn’t know how long he takes to fall asleep, nor does he know what time it is when he stirs again. But he does know there’s a sopping wet head missing from his thigh that was there before, and when he squints his eyes, succumbing to consciousness, he notices Peter sitting upright and backwards next to him. His fingers are anxious and tight on the back of the couch, jaw muscles wound firm. Morgan sits on Peter’s other side, her chin peeking above the line of cushions, too. They wear the same cautious eyes, narrowed and locked on the front door.

Blearily, Tony spins his head to look over his shoulder, and he sees Pepper standing at the door. The door is open, her body language is harsh, and she keeps one palm on the handle the whole time she speaks. Her words take a moment to reach him. They’re crisp, but slightly hushed, as though she believes the rest of the family is still snoozing a few yards away.

“I think you should leave,” she says. It’s kind enough to come across as polite, but snappy enough to get her insistence across. “You’re not really someone he wants to see right now, Steve. Frankly, I’m not sure  _ I _ want to see you either.” Pepper retrieves her hand from the doorknob, tucking it into folded arms, instead. A moment of tense silence passes, hanging especially heavy over the eavesdroppers on the couch. Discomfort lurks in the doorway. Pepper tosses a hand up. “Look, I’m sorry you drove all the way out here, but I just don’t think a visit from you is a good idea today. Try calling, like a normal person, next time.”

Outside, the people—Tony recognizes them as a group, now—shuffle awkwardly. Tony sees bits and pieces of brunet and blond hair over Pepper’s shoulders. “I know it’s inconvenient, but it’s important.” He knows the voice; it sounds like mixed feelings and something bittersweet. Steve. After his statement, Steve pauses, uncomfortable, and it only serves to accentuate the conflict. “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t,” he adds. 

The sound of a scoff rises loud and sour from Pepper’s throat. Her arm twitches like she wants to slam the door. “You don’t always seem to be here when things  _ are _ important, either.” 

Tony’s bitterness had rubbed off on his wife over all the years reflecting on his rocky relationship with Steve. They’ve both mellowed out about it—Steve probably has, too—but an inkling of defensiveness clings to their voices when mentioning the subject, even now. Steve had done a whole lot of talk about teamwork, but never followed through, and things like that don’t sit pretty, even when brushed under the rug. No rug could be big enough to cover all of that.

Steve says something else, a little more pushy; Tony stops listening to him, replacing his head space with concerns for Peter and Morgan. He waves them back out of sight. Then, standing up, he speedwalks to Pepper. One of his hands falls on her shoulder, gently nudging her to the side so he can see who else is at the door. She seems surprised he’d joined her in the doorway, but her features fade into relief, and she steps away to give him a view of outside. 

There’s Steve, obviously, water puddling upon, and rolling down, the shoulders of his leather jacket. He looks every bit the image of an abandoned dog in a storm, with his pleading eyes and dripping, golden retriever hair. The pathetic thought only serves to compel Tony to roll his eyes. In addition to Steve, Tony sees Natasha, her hood as drenched in rain as Steve’s hair, pulled over her ears to stave off the sideways storm. Finally, he sees a man he thinks he might have met before, but who he’d never bothered to learn the name of. He’s a brunet, scruffy on the chin, and tired under the eyes. Yet his eyes had begun to reflect optimism as soon as Tony had approached the door, no longer mere sleeplessness.

“Hey. Cap, Nat,” Tony greets, nodding at each of them as he says their names. “And you,” he finishes. He doesn’t bother to ask for the stranger’s name. He doesn’t extend a hand for a handshake, doesn’t invite them inside. Spits of raindrops manage to reach his own cheeks, and he’s certain it’s worse for the group outside, but he doesn’t once feel the desire to invite any of them inside. “What brings you here?” His voice fails to give much away; he’s neither disappointed nor pleased by their arrival. No cheerful greeting, no door slammed in their faces, and he thinks the neutrality is how it ought to be.

Like coworkers. Neighbors. Not teammates. Not anymore.

The man Tony hadn’t known steps forward, hands cupping together in front of him like a subconscious prayer. “Please, it’s important. Like, unbelievably important.”

Tony squares his shoulders and crosses his arms. “No, no, I believe you. Look, I’m spending a nice day with my family, so—”

This time, it’s Steve who comes closer. His brows furrow more, water trailing along the creases the action makes in his skin. “We can do it, Tony.” The statement is ambiguous, yet Tony is fairly positive he knows exactly what Steve is referring to the moment he hears those words. He thinks of everyone lost five years ago. They cross his mind in waves; faceless, nameless, but  _ innocent _ people, who had died needlessly, cruelly. “With your help, we can save all those people. Please.”

Everyone had known Thanos was wrong. The world is unfathomably worse off because of him. Even after five years, garbage lines the streets, abandoned cars and houses and furniture remain scattered in cities, memorials stand large, drab, and mournful in every major city. There are too many losses to accurately count, and they hurt all of humanity—all of the universe, even—with such a throbbing, unshakable ache, that anyone who’d thought Thanos was right before, certainly doesn’t now. 

Yet… Tony thinks of his family, the family he’d been able to build in the wake of tragedy, and how much better he is for it. His wife, his daughter, his son, Rhodey, Happy; everyone he cares about is here. Tony is luckier than most, but he can’t deny the improvement in his life. Yes, he has that infallible guilt of losing trillions of people across the universe, but he has his loved ones. He has the family he has  _ always _ wanted. Life  _ did _ get better for him after the snap. 

He hates the thought. It rings like a flat note in his ears, like an offkey chorus. 

Because he knows it didn’t get undeniably better for everyone.

Tony thinks of Steve, who’d lost the only friend from his past. He thinks of Clint, the twisted mirror of Tony, who’d lost the kids and wife Tony had gained. He thinks of Nat, who’d been forced to watch her closest friend descend into a violent madness. He thinks of Thor, who’d lost his brother, the same brother he’d lost and found so many times before. 

But worst of all, he thinks of Peter, who’d lost his last blood relative. Tony has been doing his best to raise Peter without her—helping him with high school, with part time job hunting, and now with college—but he knows Peter clings to her memory, misses her, like one misses home while they’re away. She was stolen from him, torn from his hands too young, and she had been all he had left. She was essentially his mother, was every bit the support system a mother ought to be. He’d lost the woman who was the closest thing to a mother he could remember.

And Tony knows exactly how it feels to lose a mother. 

Even though he’s been debating whether or not hearing Steve out is worth it, he suddenly knows he owes it to Peter to try. 

Sighing, he steps away from the doorway, opening his home to the team of sopping men and women on his porch. They hustle in, Pepper presses her lips into an irritated line, and Morgan and Peter shuffle on the couch—antsy at the change in atmosphere. The two skid to one side of the couch, and Morgan settles her feet on Peter’s thighs, standing with her face peering warily at the group from over his shoulder. Her eyes are narrowed, lips pursed, one arm looped loosely about his neck, while the other grips the back of the couch, as though she’s seconds from leap-frogging over it and bolting to the door. She eyes Steve the most cautiously, a flicker of recognition muddled in her gaze. 

Steve doesn’t stare back; his eyes remain cold and locked on the floor in front of him, even when Tony points the group to the glass room. As Tony watches them enter, he feels like his peace has been encroached upon. He regards them as invaders to the tranquility of his secluded house. Years ago, he’d decided to live out here for a reason. He’d traded his old life for the ease of the rustle of wind in the trees, the splashes of sunlight on the lake, and the echoing sound of raindrops on his roof. But the second the group steps foot into that room, his sense of seclusion is torn away. 

And he fleetingly fears it’ll  _ all _ be torn away. That he’ll lose all the most important parts of the life he has built for himself. He doesn’t know Steve’s plan to reverse things, he doesn’t know what he’ll have to do, he doesn’t know what he’ll have to  _ lose. _ Nothing comes for free; what will he have to sacrifice to bring back half of the entire universe? Morgan, Pepper, Peter… half of  _ everyone _ isn’t worth even  _ one _ of them. Not to Tony.

Pepper passes each of their guests a hand towel from the kitchen to dry their hair. Everyone scatters into the various chairs and couches in the room; Pepper and Tony sit with Morgan and Peter, a family mob, like a council, judging the others. Steve falls into a reclining chair across from them. He leans his elbows on his knees, knuckles wringing the hand towel. He swallows and chokes on his words for a moment. 

Tony reads Steve’s expression and his posture, which crumples when he lets his face fall into his hands. Tony dreads the meaning in that body language.

_ Nothing comes for free, _ he reminds himself.

Certainly not something as vast and important as half of the universe.

_ Nothing comes for free. _

So… 

What will he have to sacrifice this time?

What is he going to lose?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please leave kudos and comments, my crops are withering they need sustenance


	8. The Best Pieces

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HNNNNNNN These chapters are just getting more and more painful here lmaooooooo RIP YALL  
also I don't really like this one but when do I ever *sips tea*

Tony hasn’t moved from the couch. Steve, Natasha, and Scott left over an hour ago. Morgan went to bed twenty minutes ago. Pepper set dinner out on the coffee table for him ten minutes ago. And yet time feels unmoving, stuck.  _ He _ feels stuck. 

The rain pounds harder on the roof than before, like static in his ears, and the darkness of the night outside seems as though it’s closing in on him. He’s too sick to eat his dinner. Anxiety courses through his fingertips, making them quake as he brings them to his temples. A throbbing headache burns under his touch, and despite his best efforts, he can’t shake it. His eyes sting from the ten minutes he’d spent sightlessly staring at the cold dinner on the table, hoping some sort of solution would simply strike him. 

Time travel is implausible, impossible, crazy, and it makes him ill to think about. But it’s not that he’s confused by the concept because he  _ gets _ the idea they’ve thrown at him. They have the proof; Scott  _ is _ the proof. They’re right, time travel is the solution, and it leaves him feeling frustrated. 

The worried kind of frustrated. Like sitting in the hospital waiting room, pacing and scanning the door, watching for Happy and a pregnant Pepper to drag themselves in. Like standing on Titan, catching Peter, and dreading the moment he turns to dust like the rest of the team. Like sitting on that ship, dead in the stars, counting the seconds until he succumbs to malnutrition and lack of oxygen. Like watching Peter mourn his aunt. 

It’s a painful emotion.

Tony’s hands fall to his jeans, wrinkling the denim into the shape of the grooves between his fingers. 

He knows he can do it. If he takes ten minutes, he can solve the whole problem, piece together all of time travel. It would be the right thing to do. Those ten minutes could save half of the universe. Tony  _ knows _ it’s what he should do, and yet, no matter how long he mulls it over, stressed and queasy and antsy, he can’t make himself want to do it. The guilt eats away at him, like stomach acid on his soul, like he’s thrown up everything he’d eaten today and the bile sits heavy in his chest. 

To put it frankly, Tony is disgusted with himself. 

Since becoming Iron Man, he’s been trying ceaselessly to overcome his selfish instincts. It’s a mantra in his head.  _ Put other people first, pay attention to the people you care about, keep at least some of the snarky comments to yourself, don’t push everyone away. _ And  _ still, _ the need lingers. The need to answer his selfish urge to simply shut Pandora’s box right now, shove all those cursedly easy solutions back in. Because he wants to hold onto the  _ present.  _ As selfish as it is, he doesn’t know that he even  _ wants _ to solve the problem of the past. 

He’s disgusting because he’s been glued to the couch for an hour, seriously considering abandoning half of the universe in favor of a handful of people he holds dear.

The math shouts  _ NO  _ to turning away Steve’s plan, the desire to reunite Peter with his aunt shouts it louder, and even so, he can’t bring himself to fiddle with the idea the team had brought to him. Assuming they were right, it would be so easy to reverse it all. A couple minutes of flicking through the renderings of this tech, and he could fix everything. 

But not  _ everything _ is wrong, a voice in his head reminds him. 

Morgan is right, Pepper is right, Peter is right, and he fears that reversing one part, the Thanos part, could make the rest shatter. Can he truly keep only the best pieces?

Ordering FRIDAY to dim the lights, he hangs his head. Tony is the type to act on impulse, yet his impulse drags him in two opposite directions, now. Spreading him too thin, wearing his mind down to a fraying rope. His train of thought is a thread, at best, as he is. If he thinks on his dilemma any longer, he fears that thread will snap. 

He reaches forward to pinch the fork on the table between his fingers. Though he has no intentions of eating, he mindlessly pokes at his food with the utensil. It’s all he has the brain space to do. The rest of his skull is stuffed with guilt and dread, like crumpled up newspapers between his ears. 

A creak sounds behind Tony, from the last step on the staircase that’s not quite nailed down all the way. Turning his chin lazily over his shoulder, he sees Peter crossing the living room to join Tony in the glass room. He’s dressed in his pajamas—the nice pair he leaves in the cabin when he goes back to his dorm, with candy canes stitched onto the pant legs—and he has a bit of toothpaste at the corner of his lips. His eyes aren’t tired, but the rest of him is ready for bed.

“You should eat,” he notes, flicking a finger in the direction of the cold plate on the coffee table. Tony shrugs, playing with the fork in his hands. “You’re still thinking about it?” There’s a moment in which Tony pretends not to know what Peter is talking about, but it lasts no longer than the sigh he heaves from deep in his stomach.

Grunting, he harshly drops the fork back onto the table. “I just don’t know what to do, Pete.” He huffs as he drops all of his weight into his torso, which flops against the couch. His head falls backwards—neck boneless and skull heavy—only to be rattled around by his hands when they climb to his temples and squeeze. “I have no idea what to do.”

Peter crawls onto the couch next to him, merely a fraction more composed. He winds himself into a cross legged position, arms crossed and face pondering. It’s a halfhearted pondering, as though he already knows what he wants to say. He turns to Tony; his eyes are wide, gentle, infinite, and young—still the eyes of the poor kid who’d seen too much war and lost too much to it. It casts a stone onto the side of the scale telling Tony to  _ do it, _ to save some of the people Peter had lost. Yet Peter thinks differently.

“You’re not obligated to do anything, Mr. Stark.” He rocks back, palms sliding under his thighs as he does. His eyes sweep the room and catch on the rain running down the window panes in trails. The room seems softer when he smiles at it; it’s less tainted by the lingering scent of a dilemma. “If you don’t want to risk everything, no one’s gonna think poorly of you. No one would blame you. Not even Captain Rogers.” 

Of course, he’s right. Steve would never hold it against Tony—not when he has a daughter and a wife and a son to come home to. 

But it’s not  _ Steve’s _ opinion Tony is worried about.

Tony looks at Peter, whose eyes are still tracing the rain. He doesn’t look a day older than when Tony had adopted him, as innocent as ever, and his posture is at ease, at peace. There’s not an ounce of blame sitting on the curve of his brows, not a bit of judgement between his slouching shoulder blades. Looking at him, Tony can tell Peter would never be upset with him for skipping out on the chance to bring everyone back. The kid doesn’t have that much hatred anywhere in him. Even if refusing the opportunity meant losing his aunt for good, Peter would understand why Tony chose not to. 

But would Tony be able to live with himself? Would he catch a wink of sleep? Or would he sit alone on this couch every night, staring at cold dinners and mulling over how he  _ could _ have saved everyone, how he  _ chose  _ not to, how that essentially made it all  _ his _ fault? Would he drown in the thought that Peter would secretly resent him for his choice, would he think of all the people he’d let down? 

He can tell his heart rate is fumbling to a hasty, uneven clamber. His chest tightens and burns, but he says nothing. Anxiety claws at his nerves like the fork he’d been dragging along his plate; ragged grooves are carved relentlessly into his heart, or so it feels. Tears are in his eyes, watering his line of sight and wetting his eyelashes, but he dares not allow them to trail down his cheeks. 

He thinks it again.  _ It’s not Steve’s opinion I’m worried about. _

“You miss her,” Tony breathes. It’s vague, it’s not a question, because he knows Peter will immediately understand. There’s a picture of him and his aunt on the back of his see-through phone case, and Tony catches him staring at it sometimes. It’s not a question because he knows the answer; it’s vague because he knows May is perpetually on Peter’s mind. 

There’s something serene about Peter’s body language and his voice as he nods and says, “So much.” The pain isn’t gone—it will never be gone—but he’s accustomed to it. He’s made peace with her absence. His eyes aren’t welling with tears, the plain smile on his lips didn’t suddenly wither away at the mention of her. And yet, as Tony looks at him, into his eyes, at the way they follow the raindrops like they’ll somehow guide him, Tony knows he mourns her still. 

In truth, he never really had a choice of what to do, did he? 

Peter is his kid. There’s nothing he wouldn’t do for him. 

“FRIDAY,” he says, and that alone takes an immense weight off his shoulders. “You know what to do.”

She renders what Scott had been describing earlier, and as soon as Peter sees it, he drops his head into his hands. “Oh, God, I might actually… God, I might see her again?” Tony smiles, weak and uncertain. He nods just in time for Peter to lift his head and see it. The way his hopeful grin bursts and blooms on his cheeks consumes all of his features. His nose crinkles, his eyes gleam, his eyebrows dip lower on his face, as though he’s about to cry tears of pure optimism. He sucks in a hearty breath, lips shaking, and says, “Well shit, Mr. Stark—”

But at that moment, a small laugh sounds from the stairs. It’s a noise that seems to fracture the moment. The giggling slurs into a word. Innocently and cheerily, the girl on the stairs behind them shouts, “Shit!” 

Tony and Peter whip around, eyes wide and jaws slack, so much so that Tony is surprised their chins didn’t smack the back of the couch as they swiveled. Morgan sits on the bottom step, head resting on her arms, which she has laid across her knees. She smirks into the crooks of her elbows, her mischievous eyes proving she’d known perfectly well that she shouldn’t say that. 

“What are you doing up, little miss?” Peter chuckles as Tony speaks. He dries some of the tears on his cheeks with a swipe of his wrist, and Morgan gives him a funny look for it. She stands up from her seat on the step, passes over to Peter, and pokes a wet spot on his cheek. Tony’s question is ignored as the room remains silent.

Quietly, Morgan asks, “Why are you crying?” She continues poking at Peter’s face, until he gently grabs her fingers and pries them away. He takes her hands and swings them a bit. 

“The real question is, ‘why are you not in bed?’” Morgan frowns. Then Peter releases her hands in order to tap the tip of his finger on the end of her nose, and she’s all smiles again. 

She shrugs, “You guys aren’t in bed either…” Morgan clasps her hands behind her back and rocks on her feet, face smug and falsely innocent. She pokes the end of Peter’s nose, as he’d done to her, and he squints while leaning away. He mocks an offended gasp. 

Peter looks at Tony, raises his eyebrows, and says, “I mean, she does have a point.” 

Shaking his head, Tony stands. He creeps around the side of the couch and scoops his daughter up. After blowing a raspberry on her cheek, he says, “Fine, fine! We’ll  _ all _ go to bed… but let’s share some popsicles first.”

Leaping up from the couch, Peter bolts towards the kitchen and shouts, “I call the strawberry one!” 

When the snacking is said and done—and once Tony has made certain the sticky sugar water is off Morgan  _ and _ Peter’s hands—they all move lethargically to the stairs. Peter carries Morgan, the two talking tiredly and casually, but Tony lags behind. He stops about halfway up the staircase, and he turns around. His hands tremble in his pockets as he stares down at the time travel device he’d asked FRIDAY to render earlier. It’s incomplete, imperfect, but he’s committed to the process now. There’s no backing out of it. 

Tony is dreading something he can’t name. Possibilities are running through his head—terrible, awful, heartbreaking possibilities—and he has a lurking sense that everything is going to go wrong. Normally, he would talk to Pepper, so she could assure him that he’s merely paranoid. But somehow, he doesn’t think that’s all this is. The anxiety he feels is different, like the threat is real… more so than usual.

The idea of morning is unwelcome. 

With morning, comes the next step, and the next step will be one step closer to whatever his gut expects to go disastrously wrong. 

The end… the next step means  _ the end. _

And who knows what lies at the end?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please leave kudos and comments and stuffs i need love


	9. And Though I Am Gone, Just Ash in the Wind

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> im so sorry i added another chapter i couldn't fit all of the end in this one D:   
btw the title is one i pulled from one of my absolute fave lil songs: The Heritors of Arcadia !! it's from a fire emblem game and the lyrics are so so so beautiful!! like poetry <3 !!!
> 
> that line of the song goes  
"And though I am gone, just ash in the wind; one life surrendered, so yours can begin. 'Courage,' my children, this is your song. I am the Earth; I will make you strong."
> 
> it had really profound parental energy and I love love LOVE it soooo!! I used it :)

“Can I—”

“Absolutely not,” Tony hisses. “We’ve been over this. I’m not letting you anywhere near this shitshow.” 

He’s speaking to Peter, yet Peter seems to be the last thing on his mind as he marches forward. The glint in his eyes is molten from his laser focus, locked only on the circle of Avengers up ahead. And the longer he marches, the faster Peter’s heart beats in his chest. It feels as though it’s shaking rather than beating, throbbing with fear, because he knows that as soon as Tony steps up to the platform, Peter will be left behind. He’ll be out of time. Tony and everyone else will travel back to collect the stones, and Peter will be left here to twiddle his thumbs and grit his teeth through the most unbearable thirty seconds known to mankind. 

Who knows how long those thirty seconds will be for them?

Who knows how many of the Avengers will return?

Who knows if Tony will?

The machine looks twenty paces away now. That number flashes in Peter’s head like a green light, telling him to GO. But it’s so much more urgent. It’s more than a green light; it’s a car honking behind him, a person yelling at him from the passenger seat, a storm approaching from the horizon, pushing him forward. It tells him that the green light doesn’t matter. He has to keep going, even if it means bursting through a red light. It’s impossible to ignore.

Fifteen paces away. Fourteen.

Peter hastens his speed to set himself in stride with Tony. He looks up at him, implores him to look down with pleading eyes. Tony doesn’t flinch, doesn’t heed the desperation in Peter’s face. “Mr. Stark, I was at all the meetings,” he says. His voice spills all the hopelessness Tony refuses to look down and see. His breath is ragged and his shoes squeak on the tile from his tactless, rushed steps. “I know all the stones, I know what they do, where they are,  _ everything. _ If you would just let me go—”

Tony whirls. His hand closes on Peter’s shoulder. “I said no, Peter. You’re not coming. That’s final.” He resumes moving towards the team. His suit is on, the machine is running, whirring, ready to go. Peter flicks his gaze to the distance until the machine, then settles it again on Tony. 

Time feels like a rock in his throat or an explosion of boiling water in his stomach. It feels like pain. Each second, each step, claws some part of Peter’s lungs. He can’t let Tony leave. 

Seven paces away. 

The end sits seven paces away. 

“Please,” Peter says, again. “I can help. I’m fast, I’m strong, I won’t be as easily recognizable as all of you are, since Spiderman didn’t exist then. Let me come, too.” He’s out of air, out of thought, when he finishes. His shoulders heave, his throat is raw, his heart is beyond hammering. It’s drilling. Fear fills his body, so he feels as though he can no longer stay upright. “Mr. Stark, please.”

Every hair on his neck and his arms stands on end, telling him Tony leaving without him is a  _ terrible _ idea. Something is going to happen. Something awful. And if he’s not there… No, he  _ has  _ to be there. 

Tony swallows, eyes squinting shut in silent frustration. He says nothing, only walks faster, but Peter sees a split second in which his determination wavers. It crumbles, flakes a  _ fraction _ of a piece off, when Tony slams his eyes closed; his eyebrows furrow sadly, as though he truly wishes to let Peter join the team. It lasts only a moment, however, and he clenches a fist. 

“No.”

The Avengers on the platform watch closely, but do not interject. Peter can feel their judgement as much as he can feel the foreboding sense that something will go wrong. His eyes dart to them, appealing to their assumed sense of mercy, yet every wordless request goes unanswered. 

Three paces away; two, one.

Peter’s thoughts disintegrate. They’re torn away, until all he’s left with is pure, anguished rashness. In one final, broken attempt, his hand surges forward, swipes at Tony’s sleeve, snags it at the end of a finger. He immediately regrets the action. It feels childish, tugging at Tony’s shirt as if to imply that Peter is so far below him, like Tony is still this unattainable, unreachable figure. As if the only way Peter could ever hope to reach him is by stretching his fingers up to the sky, and even then, he would only catch him by the tail of his shirt.

His fingers unlatch in a split second to curl back against his own body.

Even so, Tony has stopped and faced Peter.

“You’re doing this for me,” Peter whispers. Tony makes a noise that sounds close to denial, but Peter shakes his head. “No. I know you are. You’re doing this because I miss Aunt May. There’s no use lying about it; I know you well enough to know what’s happening.” No more arguments form on Tony’s features. For once, he simply stands and stares and listens to Peter. Peter loses some of his nerve, and looks down at the hands he’s clasping in front of himself. He makes tight knots with his fingers, so his knuckles ache. “I can’t let you go out there and get hurt while helping me. Not unless I’m there, too.”

Sighing, Tony shakes his head. “Kid, I’m your dad. That’s what dads are supposed to do.”

Fire burns the back of Peter’s tongue, then bellows forth all at once. “That’s ridiculous! No relationship, not even between a father and his kid should be so one sided! You could get killed! For me! That’s unreasonable!”

“Peter, enough. It’s time for you to stop asking—”

Something snaps, or clicks into place, or the last grain of patience falls through the hourglass, because Peter firmly says, “Then I’m not asking.” Tony slams his jaw shut, teeth clacking. “I am getting my suit and I am coming, no matter how you feel. You said I was an Avenger, and that makes this just as much my mission, my  _ decision, _ as yours.”

For a moment, Tony looks furious. The anger burns right beneath his skin and pokes through in the more subtle lines on his face. In the new wrinkles that bubble up. Then, it simmers off. Tony relinquishes the argument to Peter, and that becomes obvious when his shoulders unclench from where they’re tightly wound around his neck. His eyes are tired. 

“Fine,” he breathes. “Go.” 

And that’s all he says. Those two words, in his bluntest, most unkind, begrudging tone, are all Peter gets, before Tony swiftly spins and mounts the platform.

Peter gets a few more words after he returns from rushing off to gather his suit. While his hand rests cautiously on Peter’s back, Tony murmurs, “Be careful, alright? I would hate for killing me to be the very first thing your Aunt does after she’s back, all because you couldn’t make it through this.”

Peter smiles. “I promise.” He faces forward again, then pauses. A moment creeps by in silence. Something feels unfinished. Swallowing around the feeling of expectation in his throat, Peter spins back to Tony. His brain scrambles to listen to the countdown—they’re seconds from leaping through over a decade in seconds—and he finds the missing piece in the words, “You be careful, too, alright?”

Grinning, Tony faces the center of the group before he states, “Of course. I’ve got a lot of people counting on me to come home safe.”

Time—or at least Peter’s perception of it—remains a tad wonky, so he can’t tell exactly how long ago Tony had said that. So much had happened (so much had gone  _ wrong _ ) since that conversation. The attack on New York had been somehow far more hectic than he remembered it, more of their plan had fallen apart than intended, and there had been more close calls than would allow Peter to sleep soundly ever again. Adrenaline runs high and hot in his blood, and will likely keep his hands shaking and mind panicking for months. Of that, he has very little doubt.

The mission has mostly been a smear of dangerous, near fatal run-ins and successes that seem mild by comparison. 

God, it’s hard to  _ fathom _ how much had gone so immeasurably wrong. 

Tony’s heart had stopped—per his own request—and even though it was the past Tony, Peter got queasy at the sight. Like a nightmare that he could see crisply and hear through the vibrations in his feet; all too real and all too overwhelming. Then, after all that, one of the stones still managed to evade their grasp. Last minute decisions were made, good-for-nothing Stark fathers were befriended in their frenzy to escape, and lies flowed easily from their lips. 

But finally, they’d jumped to the present. Dr. Banner had used the stones to bring everyone back, and they basked in the sense of success, in the promise of normality being restored. 

Things were anything but normal. 

Past Thanos followed them out of the portal, destroying it and just about  _ everything _ to the horizon and back—twice over—as he did. From then on, things were blurrier. 

Rubble and fire and slurred, concussed conversations whip around in Peter’s recollection of the events. Details are scarce, overrun by the current sensory overload of the battle still at hand. Enemies he can’t name—allies he can hardly name better—smother the battlefield, until it’s three fourths battle and merely one fourth field. Thanos stands tall somewhere near the center, attracting swarms of Avenger reinforcements that do little to no damage. He bats them away with all the strength required to keep a toddler at bay. 

The gauntlet is impossible to keep track of. It’s a glint of gold every now and then, snatched by one team only to be stolen again by the other. Peter has decided to let it go where it pleases; instead, he astutely watches Thanos’ hands to make sure they remain without it. If it gets close, Peter will abandon the side of the battlefield he’s slowly picking enemies off of, and he’ll play keep away with Thanos. 

Even so, Peter wonders if this battle is sustainable. He knows what victory looks like for Thanos, but for Earth…? They can’t truly defeat Thanos in his prime, can they? With a whole army breathing down their necks, with the gauntlet already assembled, with their team fractured and scattered on opposite ends of the wrecked remains of their base, is Earth’s victory plausible? He doubts there’s much strategy left in their attacks. It’s all fighting with their backs to the wall; the only options are defeat (death for the entire universe), and victory (scraping by).

With everything as it is, it’s no wonder Peter has lost sight of Tony. He wonders if he’s keeping his promise, if he’s truly doing his best to make it home safe, alive, well, intact. Trust in normal circumstances is obviously something he possesses, but in conditions like this—with everything in shambles and balanced precariously on such a tiny wire, seemingly an abyss of failure on either side—Peter feels as though Tony’s self-sacrificing nature is in its element. 

Right now, more even than winning the battle, he wants to find Tony. Shamefully, that’s his highest priority… finding his dad. Is that selfish?

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees a flash of gold. Instinctively, his eyes follow it, watching it land in the mud and debris. It’s the gauntlet. No one catches it. No one is even close to where it landed. Peter is closest, but even he is a fair distance away. It’s unattended; the tool that controls the tides of this battle is  _ unattended. _

He’d never really gotten into any sports while in high school, but the tension he feels weaving through the entire battlefield when the gauntlet lands near him (everyone sees it) is how he imagines the climax of a football game might feel. Everyone’s eyes in one place, everyone holding their breath, everyone feeling their stomach clench in anticipation as every player makes a mad dash for the ball. 

Abruptly, everyone rushes the gauntlet.

Peter changes course in a flurry. He rams every enemy off of his back and swiftly pushes through the mob. Any useful function his suit possesses is one he utilizes at that moment, because he feels the pressure of the whole battle slam against him. It’s like an immense increase of gravity because instantly, the whole Earth is counting on  _ him _ more than anyone else. 

His feet skid on ash and mud, his lungs heave so hard he can feel himself rasping, and his line of sight bounces and flicks around unsteadily. He barely manages to shove nameless enemy soldiers off the gauntlet when he reaches it. The weapon is difficult to wrangle from their equally desperate hands, but luckily, it’s muddy—slippery—enough to create an opening Peter can exploit. 

Once the metal is in his hands, he hightails it away from the heat of battle, hoping to put as much distance between Thanos and the gauntlet as possible. Everyone chases him.  _ Literally everyone.  _ Enemy and ally alike abandon their squabbles and pursue his retreat, everyone hoping to impede the progress of their enemies. 

Peter hardly makes it any distance at all before he realizes it’s hopeless. He can’t hope to escape an alien army with airships and thousands of mindlessly dutiful soldiers. He’s  _ one _ person, sprinting on foot, already injured and exhausted. Even with the fraction of a lead he’s shoved between them and himself, they’re closing in.  _ Fast. _

“Mr. Stark,” he huffs into the comms, only half expecting Tony to hear it through the thick of battle. Peter’s chest aches as he focuses on the muffled shouts of battle both around him and through the comms. The fight feels like skidding down a hill; like stumbling and failing to balance himself. But the hill is monstrous in size, and he knows that if he doesn’t slow down before he crashes at the bottom, everything is lost. The fight feels like falling, scraping his knees and ankles and palms in a futile attempt to halve his speed. The fight feels like pure fear at the prospect of not knowing how or when it will stop. The fight feels like hopelessness. 

A cough comes in through the comms, clearer than most of the miscellaneous sounds. “What’s up, kid?” Tony’s voice now feels like a hand catching Peter’s wrist as he tumbles. His voice feels like Peter’s fall being broken, stopped short. Like being hoisted back onto level, steady ground.

Peter shakily smiles, looking over his shoulder at his dwindling lead on Thanos’ army, as he says, “I have the gauntlet and everyone’s gaining on me. I need someone else to get it away.”

“On it,” Tony says, before a rush of air overtakes the comms. Peter sees him overhead only a few seconds later. He lands next to Peter and takes the gauntlet into the crook of his arm. With his other arm, he reaches towards Peter. “Need a lift?” His hand wraps around the back of Peter’s suit, where the neck meets the shoulders, and the sensation elicits some nervous reaction in his gut. Like he’s watching his life flash before his eyes because he’s certain they’ve been this way before. 

Time seems to be going backwards. Being carried by the scruff of his neck like a cat is a little too familiar; it’s reminiscent of when Tony had first come into his life, of the time he’d sent a suit to scoop him out of a lake. And it feels so long ago, but it doesn’t bloom and settle in Peter’s chest like nostalgia. Instead, it feels like time is rushing away from him, the way people describe every memory unraveling in the seconds before they die. Still, that doesn’t quite cover it all.

The thought that time is rushing backwards makes a sour knot clench in his stomach. 

There are amusing concepts of reverse aging, of reverse time and memories. Of going from adult, to teen, to child, to toddler, to baby, then… then nothing. That’s what Peter fears. Not so much that he’ll fade away, but that if time continues to ache as though it’s unraveling and sprinting the wrong direction, that he’ll reach a time where Tony is once again no longer in his life. 

He has no basis for such a fear other than the twisted, anxious premonition he feels in his gut. 

But that's all he can think about. 

That nagging sixth sense.

Tony sets Peter down away from the mob, then lands next to him. Luckily, Thanos’ army doesn’t appear to have caught up with them yet, and it gives Peter a moment to voice his concerns. “Do you remember when we were up in space, five years ago, and I told you I had a bad feeling about May?” Though Tony’s face is impossible to read through his helmet, the way his head recoils shows he hadn’t expected the question. Regardless, he nods. “Well, I— I have that same feeling now. About… you.”

“I promised I would make it home safe, didn’t I?” 

Peter slumps. “I know…”

Putting a hand on Peter’s shoulder and comfortingly squeezing, Tony shakes his head. “Then you have no reason to worry.” He pats the spot he’d held, before he takes off again, gauntlet tagging along like a curse. It lingers around Tony, the mirror image of the dread that won’t leave Peter.

For the next couple minutes, Peter busies himself with stragglers on the outskirts of the battlefield. Mostly goons who had been able to keep track of him while he was carried by Tony, and had followed, in pursuit of the gauntlet. 

Peter doesn’t communicate with his allies; the occasional glance at where he knows they’re keeping Thanos at bay is the most he interacts. They’re too far to hear by ear and Peter only has contact via comms with Tony, since their tech had probably gone haywire when the compound collapsed. So, he can’t hear any status reports or any requests for backup, and decides to simply work slowly towards the heat of the battlefield to be safe. 

The waves of enemies get heavier the closer he gets to Thanos, like he’s sinking deeper into an ocean, and the weight of the water above him gets heavier the lower he falls. And that sensation of sinking makes it harder to breathe, too—though maybe it’s merely the fear of losing his father figure that does that. 

He curses the situation, the battle… because it’s just not fair. Why does his life string along like it has no purpose other than to toss him out of one disaster and into the next? Losing his parents, his uncle, his aunt, and now his heart tells him his dad is next. Everyone has their struggles, their tribulations, their suffering, but surely the amount Peter has is extreme. It has to be more, because no one would be able to go on living if they—and everyone they knew—had to live like  _ this.  _ Humanity would fall apart if it was nothing but one cause for dread piled on another and another and another, until it all toppled over. There would be no  _ living _ in a life like that.

So, Peter has to be the only one.

He hopes he’s the only one who suffers like this.

Snot is clogging his nose, he realizes, slowly, when it trickles and he sniffs it back in. He’s crying in the heat of battle, even as he fights his way through the mob. It all hurts so much. He doesn’t want to lose someone else, least of all Tony. 

The swarm of enemies gets so thick, he begins to feel disoriented; the only reprieve he experiences—the only time he knows he’s heading the right direction—is when he occasionally sees a familiar face nearby. The sightings happen more and more frequently the deeper he goes. A flicker of Pepper’s suit overhead, a shouted order from Steve he swears he can feel at the back of his neck, a crack of well-aimed lightning he knows is from Thor. So, he keeps going, keeps digging, keeps diving farther into the heavy ocean of foes whose water pries at the seams of his lungs whenever he breathes. The sensation truly is that of drowning.

Then he hears it. He hears Tony, the particular hum of the blasters in his suit. Rushing, Peter shoves his way past all the enemies between him and the noise, not bothering to strike any of them down. He kicks, and pushes, and claws, like he’s racing against a clock that only has half a second left, like it has already hit zero and he’s still allowed to run by the grace of the referees alone. Like any adrenaline he has left is pure luck, like it’s one last spark of energy before he collapses, heart heavy and stuck in his chest. 

He crashes through the line of enemies and allies, until he has no one left to push. There’s a wide expanse of open space, at the center of which Thanos stands; his posture is something between regal and demonic, and Peter has no doubt that the foul undertones of his stance are the reason such a large radius remains empty around him. The threat in his countenance is a physical deterrent, like a spear reaching twenty or more feet, wedging precisely between Peter’s lungs to trap him where he stands. Far away, posing no threat. 

In fact, it isn’t until Peter looks to Thanos’ hand and sees the red and gold metal of the gauntlet, that he feels compelled to move at all. Thanos is putting the final stone in place when Peter begins to run. Peter watches as Tony launches himself at Thanos in a futile effort to stop him, but hardly manages to so much as slow him down. He’s thrown aside with little more than a flick of Thanos’ wrist, and he crashes wordlessly on the sidelines. Tony makes no effort to stand again.

Peter is too far from Thanos to reach him in time. Thanos is already bringing his thumb and his middle finger together, his voice already booming with the telltale line that sits in the last chapter of the universe’s book. A modified, twisted “The End.”

“I am inevitable,” he says. 

And Peter expects the world to unravel, to collapse under his feet, to crash down from the sky, to fold in on him, to swallow him into a frozen void all at once. 

Yet it doesn’t.

No, instead, Peter is exactly how he was before the snap. The battle roars around him, mud and flames scatter the landscape, and it certainly looks like hell, but the world doesn’t appear to have ended. Everything is exactly how it was. 

He wonders if the universe being destroyed simply means he’ll live out eternity in this one moment, if being consumed or torn apart by the stones meant time stopping in place. Is this what the afterlife is like? The moment of your death, replaying to the edge of infinity and back? Countless years where nothing changes, and you’re forced to suffer until you know nothing else?

Surely that’s not the case, though, as Thanos’ face contorts in the same sort of confusion Peter feels pulsing in his chest like a second heartbeat. Thanos stares at the gauntlet, flips his hand over, and he notices  _ it _ the same moment Peter does. That the gauntlet is empty. There are no stones in the scuffed metal around his hand.  _ Thanos does not have the stones. _

In unison, Thanos and Peter both look to Tony. He’s no longer curled up where he’d landed. He sits on his knees now and raises his hand next to his cheek, with the back facing outward for the entire battlefield to see. Electricity rushes up his wrist, his suit stretching and shredding apart to cradle the six points of unbearable power atop his skin. As though any form of metal could protect against the consequences of harnessing the unharnessable. 

His face is mauled with blood and bruises. He winces, jaw tight and brows cinched low against his eyelids, drawn together in a show of pain. As his fingers meet, his eyes open and his line of sight steadies, but his shoulders continue to quiver. Despite his determination to look infallible, his weakness is clear from the tremor that seizes every one of his movements.

For a moment—a fleeting, immeasurably small moment—Tony drifts his eyes over to Peter, and dissects Peter’s terrified, trembling position across the throng of fighters. If only as long as their eyes stay locked together, his facade of strength completely shatters. On his deceptively scowling lips, there lies an apology. 

For that singular, infinitesimally short moment, his eyes soften, and everything in the way he looks at Peter whispers goodbye. 

Peter knows this is goodbye.

He can’t turn away as Tony faces forward to rasp out one last line. 

“And I am Iron Man,” he says, broken and scattered. 

Yet that’s not what Peter hears. 

No, that’s not what Peter  _ feels. _

Although Peter can read the words on Tony’s lips and in his eyes, the only thing he can  _ feel _ is the painful murmur of a final farewell.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I miss him :(
> 
> (and i'm so sorry)


	10. A Weird Feeling

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HELLO!!! This is it. ;-; the final chapter.  
please skim my note at the end, because I'm thinking of doing a sort of bonus chapter and I'm gonna talk about it there o3o  
okay!!! enjoy!!!! <3 :)

All the air leaves Peter’s lungs in a torrential, earth-shattering scream, yet knowing this is the end, he finds himself surprisingly alright with the concept of suffocating. He doesn’t feel the urge to breathe even  _ one _ more mouthful of air.

Because it’s not worth it.

Because living isn’t worth it.

Because he’s  _ losing another father.  _

After a moment of choking on the pain, he snaps out of it. When he does, he immediately sends himself stumbling haphazardly to Tony’s side. Almost everyone around him is crumbling apart because of the snap; even Thanos simply vanishes, seemingly easily, effortlessly. But Peter only shoves past. He doesn’t care that they’re finally winning. At this moment, he considers victory a nuisance: one last thing slowing him down, keeping him from his dying father. 

He doesn’t even know what he’ll do once he gets there, doesn’t think he could help, but he’s desperate to try. He has to try. This is all his fault, he tells himself, because Tony wanted to do this for  _ him, _ to bring  _ his  _ aunt back. Peter is the reason Tony’s heart is slowing in his chest, the reason he is collapsed and literally falling apart. 

Peter runs as fast as he can, falling to his knees by Tony, already sobbing and wailing, as he reaches for Tony’s hand. He doesn’t touch the gauntlet’s side of his body, but he wraps both his hands around Tony’s bare one, squeezing his knuckles like it would be a cure, like something in Peter’s hold would put him back together again. 

Tony looks up at him, and his eyes are leaking his consciousness bit by bit. Every time he blearily blinks, he seems less there. He’s slipping away, through Peter’s fingers, and Peter squeezes his hand harder. Trying to drag him back, to tug him out of the River Styx. Tony’s gaze is glassy, vacant, as if Peter is transparent. As if he’s not even there. 

“Hey,” he breathes, voice waving in that throat aching way, like there’s a tumor digging into Peter’s windpipe. “Mr. Stark…” His voice cracks. His face feels half numb, like there are a thousand needles buried in his lips as he tries to speak. And his hands feel the same, so he squeezes them tighter around Tony’s. Drowning; he feels like he’s drowning. There’s too much blood and sweat on his cheeks, and tears are draining into his mouth. He can’t breathe. Peter is huffing and panting; HES fighting harder to get the words out than he’d fought to survive the battle. His words sputter out like sobs instead of anything coherent. 

“Can you hear me?” He doesn’t know why he’s asking. What does it matter? He’s losing him, he’s wasting precious final moments on asking him pointless questions. But what else is he supposed to do? Say goodbye? He doesn’t want to. God, he’d rather lose to Thanos than say such a terrible, miserable thing. “It’s Peter…” He assures Tony of that, but he sounds so uncertain of it himself, as though watching Tony waste away is making him lose a grip on who he is, too. 

He wants to help Tony, to provide him with some sort of peace as he fades away, but Peter’s gut churns at the thought. No, what he really wants is to hold tight to Tony’s trembling hands. To hold him in the land of the living, kicking and screaming and wedging his heels as far into the dirt as he can, so Tony can’t be stolen by the end. Peter doesn’t want to let him go. Not yet, not ever. “Hey,” he whispers. “Hey… we won, Mr. Stark. We won, Mr. Stark.” It doesn’t feel like it.  _ It doesn’t feel like it. _ This isn’t what victory feels like— it doesn’t taste like tears and it shouldn’t ache like mourning. 

It’s not winning without Tony. 

A hand falls onto Peter’s shoulder, prying him away from Tony, but he yanks himself free. The hand returns with more fervor, but Peter is too heavy to budge, weighed down by loss, by a stubborn desire to hold on. He refuses to lose Tony, but what can he do? Time is falling through him; he can’t catch any of it, not one extra minute or one extra second or one extra breath. Tony is running out of time, and Peter can’t snag him a moment more. 

“We won,” he promises, though he doesn’t believe it. “You did it, sir…” His enthusiasm is a show, a final performance to calm his father as he heads out. “You did it.” Heart hammering in his chest, he lowers his head. It’s pounding so fast he can hardly breathe and his voice quakes with the rest of him. It shakes and snaps and crumbles. “I’m sorry… Tony…”

Finally, the hand on his shoulder manages to tear him away; he’s too broken to fight back anymore. He lets himself be pulled away from Tony, and reaches his hands toward his father numbly, uselessly. Landing on his knees, he drops his face into his hands, sobbing, bawling, splitting apart his chest with shattered gasps for air. This isn’t fair, he silently wails. Peter is angry and terrified and hurt. His energy is consumed with sobbing, but he wants to tear at his skin with his nails or rip out his hair or dig into his lips with his teeth until he bleeds. Right now, he feels like he deserves to hurt, to bleed, to burn alive because he’s guilty. 

This is all his fault.

Rhodey is talking to him absentmindedly. Something soothing while he too tries to distract himself from mourning. Peter doesn’t hear him; there’s too much blame and pain and hopelessness screeching in his mind to hear anything. Pepper is talking to Tony, saying her goodbyes, but Peter doesn’t hear that either. He registers everything other than his crippling frustration through a coffee filter. It’s muffled and only riles his anxiety more. 

It’s not only that he feels like he has lost, it’s that he feels he  _ is _ lost. Tony is dying, and he feels disoriented without him. 

Is there truly nothing he can do? 

Peter is already thinking back on moments with Tony as though he’s reminiscing, already unraveling the moments in his heart as if to tape them into a scrapbook in his mind. As if he’ll never get the chance to make more memories, yet… is everything over? Is this it? So long, farewell, goodnight, goodbye, curtain call?

No, this isn’t supposed to be a tragedy. 

In the back of his mind, Peter feels a flicker of something telling him not all is lost. A sense, a tingle. Like an insect buzzing between his ears, quietly saying there’s one more mystery to solve, one more answer to find, one more battle to win. And it weaves itself into the memories his brain is replaying. 

One memory claws at his attention with more urgency than any other. It’s the days Peter and the other surviving Avengers had spent sprawled around the compound with half filled notepads and scattered pencils. The days they’d spent only partially awake, in a drained, unfocused state, as they reviewed their intel about the infinity stones. Where to find them, obstacles, who was best for each one. 

The crumbling part of Peter’s heart wants to hone in on the sight of Tony balancing a pencil on his upper lip, or to memorize the exasperated looks he shared with Peter when Thor spiraled onto a tangent. There’s another piece of him, the one that’s mourning, that wants to engrave every image of Tony being a hero onto the inside of Peter’s eyelids, because he fears he’ll never see it again. But the piece of him that remains logical keeps the other pieces in line. He can’t get this memory out of his head for a reason; he has to figure out  _ why. _

They’d spent those days in the compound dissecting the stones. Where they were, primarily, but also what they could do. What they could do… alter reality, manipulate people, teleport, mind control, make the user stronger, turn back time—

Turn back time. 

Peter’s head shoots up from his palms. His legs shake, but he’s on his feet in an instant. “Shit,” he hisses. “Shit!” He stumbles to where Pepper is still consoling Tony, and he murmurs a half-baked apology as he nudges her aside. Despite her confused cry and yet another attempt to tug him back, Peter kneels in front of Tony again. Urgently, his hands tighten around the gauntlet, flip Tony’s hands over, and locate the time stone. 

“Peter,” Pepper warns, sounding both perplexed and furious. “What are you doing?”

His fingers scrabble to get under the time stone; he struggles to dig it out. “Just— one sec,” he responds, nervous under the threat of running out of time. 

Pepper moves a step closer. Her voice pities him as she says, “Peter, stop. You can’t use the gauntlet. It’ll kill you.”

Hastily, he blurts, “I’m not trying to—” She manages to wrestle him away, and he whips his head angrily towards her. “Let go!” Shocked by his outburst, Pepper immediately releases him; she even sways a step back, as though Peter is dangerous. Guilt bubbles in his chest, but Peter doesn’t have time to apologize. He wrestles with the gauntlet again, head swimming.

The longer Peter fights to get the stone out, the busier the mob around him gets. More Avengers come to watch. They murmur and fret; they buzz around the scene like flies around a corpse, and the image makes Peter sick. He’s not dead. Tony’s not dead yet. And he’s not going to die. Not today, not tomorrow, not—

This time, it’s Dr. Strange who approaches him. He kneels next to Peter, and despite how uncharacteristic the tone is for him, he gently asks, “What are you trying to do?” It’s not scorn, it’s not even a passive aggressive order to stop. All he’s asking for is clarification. 

But it still makes Peter snap.

Peter can’t get the stone out—his hands are shaking too violently and his eyes are watering too intensely—and the pressure of it gets to him. He’s frustrated. The crowd’s muttering begins to claw into his skin until he can feel himself crying harder. He’s losing himself, and the only thought he can comprehend is that it’s all  _ too much.  _

So, when Dr. Strange speaks to him, he loses it. He throws his hands into his lap and bawls, not bothering to swipe at the tears or the snot. It’s not like it was with Pepper; he doesn’t get angry, he just collapses, breaks down, falls into himself. Dr. Strange looks as afronted as Pepper had, despite the different reaction. 

“The time stone,” Peter manages past the hiccups. “If I can just— when we were studying the stones, we talked about how Thanos was able to reverse time for just Vision, so I thought…” His speech is broken and he doesn’t think any of it is intelligible. He feels like he’s failing  _ again. _ Like he has to watch Tony die  _ again. _ He’s crumbling  _ again, _ losing  _ again, _ letting everyone down  _ again. _

But then Dr. Strange reaches around him.

He easily pries the stone from the gauntlet, and Peter watches him, breath halted in disbelief, as he closes his palm around it. Carefully, he rests a hand on Peter’s shoulder, urging him to give him space to—presumably—use the stone. Peter moves away. Everyone else—the mob who’d previously been so overwhelming—does the same. They step back, silenced, collectively holding their breath and optimism. 

Rhodey approaches Peter, setting one hand on his shoulder, and when Peter turns to look at him, he offers a fragile smile. One that seems like it wants to be hopeful, but that he is holding back in fear of those hopes breaking apart. Pepper comes around Peter’s other side and hugs him with one arm. She doesn’t smile, but her eyes watch Tony with a glint of something positive hidden inside. 

The moment they’re stuck in is painful, not only because Tony lies dead before them, but also because there’s an undercurrent of possible permanence. He could stay that way. In fact, under normal circumstances, he  _ would _ stay that way; if not for the time stone, there would be absolutely no way for revival to be possible. And while Peter feels lucky the stone exists, he can’t help pondering all the ways it could go wrong. The aftermath Tony’s death would cause. 

Morgan, growing up without a father.

Pepper, having lost one of the few people she had that deep, understanding relationship with.

Rhodey, being without his best friend for the rest of his life. 

And Peter doesn’t want to think about himself, but he’s trapped in this loop in his brain, fretting about all the things he’ll have to do in life without his father. Graduating college without him, getting married without him, maybe having kids one day that would never meet their grandfather. The idea of losing the family he found is beyond devastating. It grates on his soul, strips him down into fractured, raw pieces. 

So, he thinks watching Tony’s wounds come undone and seeing the life flicker back into his eyes will be relieving. But it’s not. It’s gruesome and painful, and his stomach lurches when all the bruises and decaying skin flutter on Tony’s features. They recede, but Peter is forced to watch them move like they’re alive. Like the destroyed half of Tony’s body is living: a parasite, a tangible thing that  _ kills. _

Peter hastily tugs himself from Pepper’s half hug and slips out from under Rhodey’s hand. He turns and jogs away from Tony, pushing past the circle of Avengers, before he lets himself fall into the mud. His pulse is thrumming, pounding so hard, he can feel it in every inch of his body, and there’s a lump at the back of his tongue like he’s about to empty his stomach. Clenching a fist on the ground, he lurches forward and dry heaves. It’s all overpowering. The victories, followed by the losses, followed by potential solutions, followed by having to watch everything happen again in reverse—

He can’t breathe or think beyond the thought of his hammering pulse and his sweaty palms. And Tony. Tony, his dad, the only family he’s had for the last half a decade. All he’s had, and he  _ lost him, _ and suddenly Peter loses his grip on the remaining possibility of fixing everything. It slips past his memory, and he forgets that it’s not over yet, that things can still get better. He’s suffocating, he’s being buried alive in his own skin. The world around him is a blur, time is going forward and backward and warping around him, until—

“Kid.” 

Peter’s throat feels like it’s caving in; he claws at it with his muddy fingernails, like he can tunnel a new airway. Because the old one isn’t working. He can’t breathe.

“Peter,” someone addresses him again. 

A single breath of air manages to worm its way past the barricade in his lungs. A sliver of light breaks through the swarm in his mind. 

“Peter, snap out of it!”

Everything barrels back to him at once. He gulps down one, two, three mouthfuls of air in a rush, and it makes his head burn. But he can breathe again, at the very least, and finally the world comes into focus around him. 

And there, kneeling next to him, less than an arm's length away, is Tony. He’s covered in dirt and there’s still dried blood scattered about his face, but he’s there. His eyes aren’t vacant or glassy; they’re attentive and concerned and careful. His breath isn’t coming out in gasps or coughs or hoarse whispers, either. Though clearly distraught, he’s also very,  _ very _ clearly alive.

He smiles tentatively. “You remember those memes about ‘sharing a brain cell’ you showed me?” he asks. Peter nods, still dazed from the whirling assault of catastrophe that had  _ just _ crashed into him. The adrenaline and panic are still buzzing all throughout his body, and Tony is asking about memes? Quietly, Tony says, “Yeah, I think that’s you and me. But, like, not a brain cell. We share the right to good vibes or something.”

Squinting, Peter scrunches his nose. “Good… vibes?”

Tony reaches back and scratches the base of his skull. “I mean… we can never  _ both _ be okay at the same time. When you were alive, I was dying because of the stones, then when I was coming back, you were over here having a panic attack. We share the rights to good vibes, I’m telling you, kid.”

Peter laughs weakly, uncertain of his emotions about everything going on. Too much has been attacking him at once, but Tony is right. When something goes right for one of them, it always seems like the very next thing that happens to the other is undeniably horrible. Peter thinks of when he lost May, and when Tony and Pepper had Morgan. It seemed not everything could be alright at once. 

Except… Well, Peter looks around him now, and it seems like now, in this one moment, everything  _ is _ alright for once. Tony is here, Pepper and Rhodey are too, Thanos is gone, and Peter feels… he feels okay. The little ache he’s felt in his chest for the last five years—the one that sounded like an alarm blaring, shouting that the universe is broken and wrong—isn't there anymore. The thoughts alerting him of his Aunt’s disappearance, that sixth sense he felt up in space after the first snap, are gone. His so-called spider sense is surprisingly… silent.

Maybe this is the start of a cure.

Because right now, both he and his dad are okay and happy. Things are alright. Peter lets himself believe things are alright, for this one moment.

As the thought settles in his stomach—warm and pleasant and comforting, the way tomato soup soothes your stomach after you’ve been sick all day—it makes him cry. He’s still chuckling about Tony’s untimely meme reference, when slowly the laughter melts into tears. The crying hits him like it has been sitting behind his eyes for the last five years, going stale. He slumps, as if all the life has slipped out of him, because he’s exhausted; he’s tired of all the loss. And this time, he hasn’t lost anything.

“Oh, shit, wait, okay, I didn’t think my joke was that bad,” Tony quickly says. He shifts on his knees a little, uncomfortably and guiltily, and he sets his hand awkwardly on Peter’s shoulder. “Hey, kid… we won.”

Peter wipes uselessly at his eyes. “I know,” he responds in a warbled voice. “That’s why I’m crying.” He looks at Tony, offers him a soggy smile, and sees Tony’s eyes are as glassy as his own. “I just can’t believe it’s over and you’re okay, and I’ll get to see May again, and I get to go home. I get to go  _ home, _ Mr. Stark. With you, and Aunt May, and everyone, and—”

Tony smiles softly, leaning closer to Peter so he can draw him into a hug. “I know, kid.” He pats his hand between Peter’s shoulder blades, then grips the back of his suit. His hands are shaking, Peter notices. And his hug is tight and desperate, as if Tony can’t quite believe everyone is okay, either. Setting his chin on Peter’s head, he says, “Let’s go home, Pete.”

At those words, the smile that was previously only a sketch on Peter’s face steals every inch. His eyes scrunch and gleam, and his cheeks push up into little bundles on either side of his face. Happy tears make mud on his lips because  _ he is going home. _

Until Pepper chuckles. “Aw, that’s cute,” she monotonously says. “You think we’re going home?” Peter and Tony lock eyes on her wry smile, concerned and confused. She laughs again and shakes her head. “More like let’s go to the hospital,” she corrects, stepping forward and putting a hand on Peter’s back. “We just saved the  _ universe _ and you think we’re going home without a few stitches?” She smiles as she speaks, an assurance that she’s as pleased with being homeward bound as Tony and Peter.

Nonetheless, Tony blows a raspberry in answer to her words, then sticks his tongue out. He says, “You mean I used the infinity stones, saved the universe, and literally  _ died,  _ but I don’t get to go out for my celebratory frozen yogurt? We went for shawarma after the attack on New York!” Pepper shifts her face into a disappointed frown, her eyebrows low on her forehead. “So, no frozen yogurt?” She blinks, looking even more unconvinced. “A Dairy Queen Blizzard?” She crosses her arms. “Okay, fine, I’ll settle for a McDonald’s ice cream cone, but that’s my final offer.” 

“Mr. Stark, the McDonald ice cream machines don’t even work on normal days. Do you really think they’ll work during the apocalypse?”

“Alright, fair point.”

The whole group laughs. They’re all more than a little delirious from their injuries, and they’re all high on adrenaline and excitement, but their laughter is elated—the kind of joy that rolls like a breeze in your lungs—and Peter is finally at ease. 

_ Finally, _ he thinks.

_ Home. _

__________

It takes one month for everything to get sorted out. They sort out paperwork and discussions about custody of Peter and the ownership of the Parker apartment, not to mention the intensely polarizing debate over whose job it would be to take out the trash every week. But even so, in one month, life is going smoothly again.

It takes two months for Tony to start making jokes about his time on death’s doorstep. For the most part, there’s no evidence that his heart had stopped at all, but there’s the undeniable matter of his arm. It’s twitchier than it used to be; Peter catches Tony’s fingers drumming more often, and his hand is always shaking. Tony complains about it a lot. He’ll grumble at his trembling limb, threatening to cut it off and attach Dum-E to its socket instead. No one really likes the jokes—every quip is met with a room full of peeved comments about it being “too soon”—but telling Tony his humor is in poor taste has always been a losing battle. For Tony, unhealthy coping mechanisms take only two months to set in.

It takes three months for humanity to scrape itself back onto its feet. The process is something between learning something entirely new, and discarding all the now-irrelevant knowledge they had gathered the past five years. It’s learning, unlearning, finding homes for half of Earth, stretching a small supply of resources to meet the demands of a sudden influx of hungry mouths, providing therapy, rebuilding cities, and just… finding what humanity even is anymore. Everyone has a hard time swallowing it, a hard time processing how the universe has changed. But the Avengers are there to guide it all. In three months, people begin to relearn what it’s like to breathe easy again.

It takes four months for Tony to crack and start begging Pepper for a week off. Anytime Pepper and Tony occupy the same space, Tony hunts her down and throws himself atop her shoulders. He whines, steals documents from her hands, snags the elastic keeping her hair out of her eyes, and overall pesters her. All the while, he babbles about Disney, cruises, beaches, anything he can think of that  _ isn’t _ the endless pile of paperwork he is surely ignoring on his desk, until Pepper caves. She takes her hair tie back, and as she fixes the mess Tony has made of her head, she agrees to one week in California. Emphasis on the one.

Tony’s rejoice is immediate, but Pepper is quick to shut the celebration down. 

She holds up a finger, leveling a stern gaze at her husband. “On  _ one  _ condition: you have to take me on at least one date night somewhere nice.”

Snickering, Tony starts to ask, “Does—”

“No, In-N-Out does not count as ‘somewhere nice’.”

Tony shrugs. “Worth a shot.”

“I’ll go to In-N-Out with you, Mr. Stark,” Peter pipes up from where he’s seated across the room. 

“And with that, Peter Parker takes the lead in the race for Favorite Loved One!”

Pepper rolls her eyes and takes her leave, after making sure to remind Tony to pack a suitcase  _ sooner _ than five minutes before they have to leave. He furrows his brows and shares a skeptical look with Peter, like what Pepper had suggested was bafflingly bizarre.

Once they’ve made a few phone calls to Happy, May, and Rhodey, everything is in line for a family flight to the west coast. Before they know it—but after Peter ensures Tony  _ does _ actually pack a bag—they are exploring and enjoying the reopened tourist attractions across the country. The streets of San Francisco are filled to the brim again, trolley cars drift past with their seats occupied, and gift shops, ice cream parlors, and museums are all swarmed with locals and tourists alike. It’s not the normal bustle of the city, either; it’s families thrilled to be reunited, celebrating life in a way many of them had taken for granted before. 

When the Starks and Co. settle atop their salt-crusted towels by the ocean on their third day of vacation, countless other families join them. The sand is dotted with a maze of vibrant umbrellas and sandcastles everyone has to weave through to reach the shore, and the air tastes like sunscreen as much as it does the ocean breeze; the beach is alive and human. Peter enjoys a busy, stuffy vacation that might have been a nuisance in the past because it’s the white noise no one notices until it’s gone. Because that headache of crowds is finally back. After five years, he gets to soak in the  _ whole Earth _ again.

Peter rolls over into a patch of towel the sunlight has warmed. He watches Morgan and Pepper digging moats in the sand out of the corner of his eye, while he scrolls lazily through TikTok. Social media is different—the whole of Gen-Z culture is different—than it used to be. Jokes about self deprecation have been replaced by optimism, the bleak outlook on life is a thinner barrage than before, and for these last few months, people have, surprisingly, been looking up. Videos expressing gratitude to the Avengers or photos before and after relief efforts spill in positive waves from Peter’s phone at all hours of the day. Though he knows the optimism won’t last, though he knows it’s the euphoric aftershock of something  _ finally _ going right, he’s content with the change of pace. 

Smiling down at a TikTok thanking Spiderman, he clicks the power button on his phone and slips the device under his thigh. His head flops to one side to catch up on Morgan’s attempted moat, which has been swept away by the rising tide (and, evidently, poor planning). The failure, or rather, Morgan’s frantic and futile attempts to save her drowning architecture, brings fondness to his cheeks. Eventually, she throws her hands skyward in surrender before retreating to the towels for a mournful CapriSun. She waves at Peter as she passes his array of towels to reach the cooler.

“Strawberry Kiwi or Fruit Punch?” she asks, prying open the lid.

After a hum, Peter definitely says, “Fruit Punch.” 

Morgan nods, fishes out two pouches, and tosses one to Peter. He catches the drink and makes room for her on his towel bed to show his gratitude. She finds her place cross-legged next to him, and for a while, the two sip in blissful silence; in their own separate serenity, they observe the chaos of the beach. They peacefully take joy in the misfortune of others—wild seagulls tearing sandwiches from tourists’ hands, mothers chasing their children with sunscreen, kids burying their older siblings and parents in the sand while they nap under their umbrellas. And Peter gets a wicked idea. 

“I think your dad, May, and Uncle Rhodey are chilling in the shallow part of the ocean,” he offers. Casually, he crumples his empty CapriSun in his hand as he glances at Morgan with mischievous eyes. “And I think there’s a squirt gun in my bag—” Morgan is halfway into the bag before he finishes his thought. A moment later, she sprints to join the chaos of the beach, squirt gun in hand. 

Peter sinks back into his towels and reflection. 

Honestly, it’s only half of a whole reflection—he’s sure he dozes off a dozen times during his pondering—and he’s okay with that. It’s a weird feeling, being okay with lazing around and letting his mind wander. Maybe it’s surreal simply because worrying is in his nature, but he thinks there’s more to it than that. In truth, he thinks it’s strange because for years, letting his mind wander meant opening the gates to all sorts of emotional pitfalls. Giving his brain free rein meant he could very well be willingly throwing himself into a lake of grief with rocks tied round his ankles; he could be freely sending himself to drown. So, naturally, the sudden shift in what his brain is allowed has left him shaken. 

It’s straightforward, really. Years of battles in space, of watching the world collapse, of time travel, will give anyone a lingering sense of expectation—an expectation that relaxation is temporary and, God forbid, invites danger. 

Despite that, however, relaxing is easy now. 

Peter has had his spider sense, as he calls it, since he got bitten by that radioactive spider. It has pestered him with nothing but warnings and curses and panic as long as he has felt it. It has predicted the future and swarmed him with mistakes of the past. For five years, it spent every waking moment weaving painful reminders into his every breath. It shoved the fact that half of the universe was missing down his throat any chance it got. 

He feels it now, too; an instinct, a sensation as natural as touch or taste or sound, flickers in the back of his mind.

Yet this time, the suggestion it plants in his heart isn’t dread. When its roots settle in, he doesn’t think to be wary or on edge. This time, the feeling blooming in his chest is peaceful. Peter crosses his fingers as he dares to think that the feeling is—

Tony approaches him, dripping wet with a water gun swinging atop one finger, and drops onto the towels as well. “Penny for your thoughts?” 

They share a smile. Peter shakes his head. 

“Not much thinking going on here,” he admits. “Just feeling.”

“That’s allowed.” Tony pauses. “Penny for your feelings, then?”

“Peaceful,” Peter answers easily. Yet he stops short of the full answer. He knows what his spider sense is telling him; he knows what the feeling is, but… could it be like a birthday wish, meant to forever remain unspoken? Would divulging the feeling cause it to vanish? 

After a moment, he crosses his fingers again as he dares to finish. 

“I feel happy,” he confesses.

Tony’s smile softens and he wraps an arm around Peter’s shoulders in an awkward sort of father-son hug. “Me too, kid. I’m really happy. I’m glad I can be here with my family.”

The happiness in Peter’s chest tingles down to his fingers and his eyes water.

A weird feeling, indeed.

“Me too, Dad.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me, sipping on a glass of your happy tears: sup
> 
> I really really hope you're happy with how this ended!! Surprisingly, I kinda am??? As always, you are more than welcome to draw art for this fic, BUT PLEASE PLEASE SEND ME A LINK I WANNA SEE!! Leave comments and kudos if you want, and get some sleep kiddos!!! I know you're probably reading this at 2AM. I see you. I know school is cancelled because of the coronavirus but sleep is still a necessary human function.
> 
> OKAY ABOUT THE BONUS CHAPTER I MENTIONED!!  
The whole time I was writing this fic, I kept thinking about that scene where Tony sees his father in the past when he's getting the stones. I was thinking about it not because I like howard (he's a dick), but because I kept thinking about how hilarious it would be for Howard and Peter to interact. Like. Tony trying to make up with his dad, and Peter glowering from over his shoulder like "YOU DON'T DESERVE MR. STARK HE TOLD ME U WERE AN ASSHOLE"  
idk I personally would greatly enjoy writing that, but let me know if you all would want to read it !!  
it would be a separate fic that I'd put in the same series as this one! :0
> 
> THAT'S IT!! I'm so glad you all joined me on this emotional whirlwind, and thank you all for holding out until the end :) I hope it's everything you wished it would be !!

**Author's Note:**

> i cri  
please leave kudos and comments because I've been working super hard on this!! it means a lot to me! thank you ily!! ;-;
> 
> [marvel blog!](https://peterparkerincorrectquotes.tumblr.com/) (it has hc asks, short blurbs of writing, and original memes!)  
[writing blog!](https://cakepopple.tumblr.com/)


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